Deader Still

3

We stopped at a deli to fill my pockets with Life Savers, Connor’s treat. The guy behind the counter didn’t even blink an eye, but this was no surprise. We were only a block away from the Javits Center, and with two Spider-Men, one Co-nan, and three cross-dressing Buffy’s in line behind us, buying eighteen packs of Life Savers looked pretty normal.

When we were done, we headed west toward the water, the cool wind of the river intensifying as we got closer.

“You sure I’m going to need all these?” I asked. I looked down at my bulging pockets. I felt like a squirrel storing up nuts for the long winter.

“Not sure, kid,” he said, darkness in his voice. “Just want you to be ready. We don’t want you sending your body into hypoglycemic shock.”

If Connor was stocking me up with this much life-savery sugar, we were probably heading for something big.

“You mind telling me what’s going on?” I asked.

Connor shook his head.

“I’d rather you see for yourself. I don’t want to put any ideas in your head before you get a chance to check out the scene.”

We crossed the West Side Highway and headed north toward Pier 84. Police tape ran across the entrance to the pier and a few cops were lingering nearby, but none of them would make any sort of direct eye contact with either of us, which was unusual. More often than not, the regular cops regarded the Department of Extraordinary Affairs as a bullshit operation, and we were constantly the butt of their derisive jokes. This time, however, there was a cloud of quiet hanging over the cops that I liked even less than their usual disdain.

Luckily, David Davidson, our liaison with City Hall, was waiting for us outside a small office complex farther along the pier. He was politics personified, but with one foot in our paranormal world, he was also the best friend we had when we wanted to get anything done in this city—when he wasn’t busy being just as helpful to a million other (and often evil) interests.

After showing our badges to the cops manning the police tape line, we ducked under it and headed toward Davidson. The wind blew his tan trench coat out behind him like a superhero cape, making me wonder if he might be heading over to the Javits Center later to hang with that crowd.

“Gentlemen,” he said, forcing a practiced smile. He shook hands with both of us, but the smile disappeared in a grim flash.

Connor seemed unfazed by it all. “Still aiding and abetting the enemy, Davidson?” he said. “The Office of Plausible Deniability keeping you busy?”

“Listen,” Davidson answered with smoothness in his voice. “The mayor has the interests of all his constituents to consider. Politics is a slippery slope. You know that, Connor. And when we took up the clarion call of the Sectarians Rights Movement, well . . . Even we make missteps sometimes.”

I looked back over my shoulder at the somber faces of cops.

“What’s got everyone so spooked?” I asked.

Davidson cleared his throat and looked at me with eyes that often held a hypnotic quality, but didn’t today. “Harbor patrol dragged one of those booze cruise boats in today after the boating company reported that it hadn’t returned to port last night. Party boarded at six thirty; ship left at seven and should have been back around ten after circling Manhattan.”

“A three-hour tour,” Connor said, trying to sound like Thurston Howell but failing on every level. “Were the Professor and Mary Ann on board?”

Davidson gave him a look that shut him down. I reminded myself to thank him later. If I had to hear Connor call me “Lovey” one more time . . .

The sound of footsteps coming from farther down the dock made me turn, and I saw a familiar figure from the D.E.A. heading toward us. Godfrey Candella was in a suit, as usual, with his dark hair neatly parted but threatening to fall down over his black horn-rims.

“Godfrey?”

“Hello, Simon . . . Connor,” he said, fidgeting with a notebook in his hands. His face looked grave.

“You get what you need?” Davidson called out to him.

Godfrey nodded. “For now,” he said, and looked at Connor and me. “I’ll need to talk to you both back at the office when you’re done checking out the scene. For the Gauntlet archives, of course.”

“You okay?” I said, noticing how green around the gills he was. Not that he wasn’t normally a little sickly looking, but today he somehow looked worse.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m just not used to such gruesomeness.”

Connor turned to Davidson. “Since when do you call the Gauntlet in before the investigators get a look at the scene? I’m all for the paper hounds getting things down for historical records, for future generations and all. Hell, I’ll even nominate Godfrey for sainthood just for archiving Simon’s rambling oral history of the whole Sectarians Surrealist Underground thing at the Met, but there’s a protocol for an investigation. Members of the Gauntlet do not do field investigation, only reporting.”

Davidson held up his hands. “Whoa, now. I didn’t call him.”

“Bullshit.”

“Suit yourself,” Davidson said, giving up.

Connor was clearly gearing up to lay into him, but Godfrey cleared his throat.

“Actually,” he said, “I just happened to be in the neighborhood. I was following up on some leads we have in the archives on old ghost-pirate sightings on the river and one of them led to an old boathouse nearby. That’s when I spotted Davidson and his officers and I came over.” He gave a grim smile. “I’m lucky like that, I guess. Anyway, I thought I’d just get down some reporting notes since I was here. I know my job as an archivist is to observe and nothing more. I didn’t even touch the crime scene, I swear.”

“I told you,” Davidson interrupted, the impatience thick in his voice. He walked farther out onto the pier, leaving the three of us behind.

“You’ll stop by after you’ve had a look?” Godfrey asked. “I should get back to the Gauntlet.”

I nodded. Godfrey gave a quick smile and headed toward the city.

“Are you two going to check this out or not?” Davidson called out.

“Keep yer panties on,” Connor said. We started toward the end of the dock, where a boat was moored.

“I’ll warn you,” Davidson said, “you may want to strengthen your resolve before stepping on board.”

The party boat had two short decks and was the length of maybe four city buses. Long windows for sightseeing lined both levels, but from the outside they looked dark, and I couldn’t see through the tempered glass. We boarded at the back of the boat and I stopped dead in my tracks. Inside the main section of the boat there were bodies all over the place, pale limbs sticking up from a sea of colorful suit coats and party dresses.

The deck of the boat was thick with the dead. As we picked our way toward the doors to the interior, I had to step with caution. Unfortunately, my eyes settled on those of a lifeless dark-haired woman in a green, swirly-patterned dress and my balance faltered. I grabbed for the railing and steadied myself before I could peel my eyes away from the blank glare of hers. Her sheer stillness creeped me out to the nth degree. It was surreal, like being in some sort of macabre fever-dream. I had never seen so many dead bodies in one place before.

Connor and I pushed through the first set of doors, with Davidson following behind us. The main level of the ship’s interior was a large oval dance floor surrounded by a second-story balcony overlooking it. Bodies were draped haphazardly over the railing, and the faint copper stench of blood was in the air. I fought back the urge to throw up.

“Jesus,” I said.

Connor shook his head. “I don’t think Jesus had jack to do with this, kid.”

I crossed to the one thing left standing along the edge of the dance floor, the spot where a DJ had set up his sound system. A young man in a skewed trucker’s cap, most likely the DJ himself, was slumped over the console, as lifeless as everything else on the ship. I positioned my hands to examine him and then looked to Davidson.

“May I?” I asked.

He nodded. “None of those cops out there could make heads or tails of it. Be my guest.”

Connor stepped up next to me. A dried spot of blood was on the mixing board below, and it lined up with a tear of chewed-up skin at the base of the man’s neck.

“You know,” Connor said, “for the number of bodies at this crime scene, doesn’t the place seem sorta bloodless to you?”

I checked the floor for blood. Connor was right—there was very little. With this many bodies, the place should have been slick with it.

“Vampires?” Connor said, sounding slightly hopeful despite the fact that we were standing in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

Even though the Department had government tedium written all over it, at its heart we were all closet cryptozoological nerds eager to spot any number of oddities. While the motto of the NYPD was “To Serve and Protect,” I had always thought our motto should be “To Gawk and Appreciate.”

“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions,” Connor continued, “but everyone from the Inspectre on down has been chomping at the bit for any sign of vampiric activity.”

I nodded and thought of the dry-erase board mounted high over the bull pen in our office. It read: “It has been 736 days since our last vampire incursion.”

“I don’t want to go all Code Bela over all this,” I said, “but it’s a possibility.” I turned to David Davidson. “Are there any witnesses?”

He shook his head. “Not anyone who survived,” Davidson said. “They even fished a few people out of the water who looked like they had jumped to escape whatever did this. They weren’t bitten, though. They simply drowned.”

“I doubt there’s anything simple about drowning,” Connor said, and his face went dark. I remembered that his own brother had gone missing from a beach when they were kids, and it was likely he had drowned.

Connor squatted next to the DJ’s equipment and examined two women who looked like they had been clutching each other for dear life before they had died. He pulled a vial from one of his pockets and flipped the lid on it, releasing the scent of patchouli into the air.

“What the hell is he doing?” Davidson asked, covering his nose. “Trying to attract hippies?”

“Quiet,” I whispered. “He’s attempting to bait any lingering spirits.”

I waited as long as I could before speaking again.

“You getting anything?”

He shook his head, scanning the roomful of bodies. “Nothing. Not a soul in the room right now. Don’t know how I’m supposed to talk to the dead if they’ve scattered off already . . .”

Davidson stood there watching the two of us, making me self-conscious on top of already being creeped out.

Finally, Connor looked up. “You ready to dig in, kid?”

“Not really,” I said. I pulled out a roll of Life Savers, unwrapped it, and crunched the whole thing down in three bites. “But we owe it to these people to get to the bottom of it, so . . . let’s find out why this whole mess has landed in the hands of Other Division, shall we?”

With my gloves on, I gently lifted the DJ off his array of turntables and lowered him to the floor with care. There were a lot of things that Connor and I had yet to try in my training, but I wasn’t about to start taking psychometric readings off corpses. I couldn’t read clothes, anyway. Objects had always been the trigger for me, so I pulled off my gloves and started with one of the turntables.

I willed my power into action without a problem. The turntable was ripe with fresh information. I could feel it arcing into me as the electric hum of connection to the object hit the center of my mind’s eye. As I popped into the vision, I found myself standing in the exact same spot; the only exception was that, in my vision, all of these dead bodies were still alive and dancing. My heart ached at how full of life, movement, and sound the room was.

I was the DJ in this scenario, feeling whatever he felt last night. At the moment, he was charged with the energy of the deep bass he was pumping out and I found myself caught up in his sensations, his heart rushing in time with the music.

I looked down and caught his reflection off one of the CD cases lying on the edge of his equipment tower. I wore headphones, each the size of a cinnamon bun, giving the DJ a Princess Leia-like quality as he worked his sound equipment. While one song played out over the crowd, he was busy cuing the next with the use of the headphones. His concentration was so fixed on his job that it was no wonder he didn’t notice much of what was happening around him.

Although I was a passive passenger in the DJ’s body, I was able to look around the rest of the room even though his focus was on the turntable. Faster than I could follow, the dance floor was turning into a sea of panic, people screaming and running for their lives. I wanted to scream out for him to lift his goddamned head and see what was going on, but by the time he looked up from his turntable, half the room was writhing around on the floor as the rest of the crowd trampled over them in their attempts to get away. But from what? Looking around, the DJ couldn’t see whatever caused the commotion, which only meant . . .

He spun around in time to catch a flash of glowing red eyes as a humanoid shape lunged at his neck, the sharp tear of fangs puncturing his jugular. Trapped in his body as I was, I could feel him dying as his blood was being drained. His chest tightened, a scream of horror catching in his throat as his heart started to slow. Caught up in the DJ’s fear, I felt helpless to pull myself out of the vision. I’d never been trapped inside someone in the throes of death before, and I wondered if there was any chance that I would die myself if I stayed in that moment long enough. It seemed I was about to find out—I couldn’t pull myself out of it and my world went dark.

I snapped out of the vision only to hear the tail end of my own scream echoing in the now-still room. I was laid out on the floor with Connor standing over me, one fist balled like he had just punched someone—which made a lot of sense because my jaw hurt like a son of a bitch. I sat up, touching my face to assess the damage.

“You okay, kid?” Connor said. “Sorry about decking you. You went all white and you were screaming.”

I stood up on shaking legs, leaning against a nearby column for support.

“I . . . I . . .” I started, but couldn’t finish. My face hurt, and my blood sugar felt abnormally low. How long had I been in the vision and how much energy had it sapped from me? My body shook with the dizziness of hypoglycemia. The faint smell of blood mixed with the overpowering fruitiness of the Life Savers I had eaten minutes ago. I felt my stomach clench. I was going to be sick.

I fought back the urge as I staggered for the doors at the far end of the room. My feet slammed into several of the bodies as I went, repulsing me even further, but by the time I ran out onto the back deck of the ship my only concern was not throwing up all over them. I jumped over the railing and onto the pier, fell to my knees, and emptied the contents of my stomach into the Hudson River.

I felt better the moment I was done, except for the shaking. I collapsed on my side. Although the idea of eating anything right now seemed impossible, I fished out another roll of Life Savers.

“You okay, honey?” a voice said from behind me. I rolled over. A woman in her fifties stood there in a white, button-down shirt and blue sailor pants that rose a good two inches above her navel. A tiny gold badge from the cruise line proclaimed that I should “Come Sail Away with . . . Maggie!” Her blond hair was done up in a fifties beehive, making her look like an ancient version of the cruise director from The Love Boat.

I nodded and rolled to my knees. The sugar replenished itself in my body, and I eventually stopped shaking. By the time I was on my feet, Connor and Davidson had joined me.

“This,” Davidson said, “is Maggie, the woman who called in the missing boat last night.”

“Our condolences,” Connor said. “To your guests and your crew.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head, on the verge of tears. “Thank you.”

“Is there anything you can tell us?” Connor continued. “Anything you saw that might have been out of the ordinary?”

Maggie thought a moment. “It was very late,” she said, “and when they towed the ship back to dock, there was a heavy fog. When it pulled in, I could hear some of the stray dogs we get down here on the dock going wild. I just assumed they sensed death or whatever . . . whatever had happened to all those people. Then they went silent and when I caught sight of them, there was a strange one I had never seen before, just standing there menacing the whole crowd of them until they all shied away. Then it ran off toward the city. And then I realized everyone on the boat was dead. Who could have done something like this?”

The woman burst into hysterical sobs. There was nothing I could say. Davidson put an arm around her. I gave Connor a look and moved him away from them to talk.

“Are we talking werewolves here?” I asked. I had read at least three of our pamphlets on lycanthropy, and thanks to one Five O’ Clock Shadow or Something More? I knew how rare they were in an urban environment.

Connor shook his head. “I don’t think so, kid. If that boat was the work of werewolves, those bodies would have been half-eaten and there’d be blood everywhere. What did you see in your vision?”

“Not much,” I said, “but enough to freak me out—that’s for sure. Everybody was panicking, so it was hard to focus on just what the hell was going on. I caught a glimpse of what killed the DJ, though. Red eyes, fangs, went straight for his throat. Drained him almost completely. This gives us enough to call it in, right?”

“As long as you’re sure, kid.”

I nodded. “When we get back to the office, we’ll call it in as a vampire.”

“A vampire?” Connor said. “A single vampire couldn’t have drunk all that blood. We’re talking about a good-sized nest of them.”

I nodded, just a little excited by the prospect, despite the tragedy I had witnessed. Being part of Other Division, you had to get off a little on the extraordinary things you ended up dealing with. Vampires were certainly high on the list.

Davidson walked off with Maggie, escorting her back to the boating company’s office.

“Are they going to do anything for her?” I asked.

“For her?”

“I think she might be a little traumatized by all this,” I said. “I know I am.”

“It’s New York City,” Connor said with a shrug. “She’ll write it off mentally. Weird shit happens. Most people ignore it.”

I stared at him. “That’s it? We’re just going to leave her mental stability to chance?”

Connor stared at me a minute, but I refused to look away.

“Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll put a Shadower team on her. If there’s any signs she’s flipping out, we’ll bring her in and put her through counseling. Happy?”

I nodded. Davidson returned from the offices alone.

“She’s okay,” Davidson said, his smile returning as he joined us. “I was testing out some of the spin I’m going to have to use with the media on this one. She seemed to be buying the ‘bad shrimp’ story I was planning on going with.”

“Deadly shrimp-poisoning?” I said. “People are going to buy that?”

Davidson nodded. “It seems a lot easier to buy than, say, vampires, doesn’t it?”

He had a point.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “That’s for the Office of Plausible Deniability to contend with. Besides, on the plus side of this case, at least we got lucky in one respect . . .”

I felt my anger twitch in. “What the hell’s lucky about a boatload of people dying?” I asked.

“It could have been worse, gentlemen,” he said. “This could have been far more tragic. Luckily, the cruise was booked as an office party for a bunch of litigators. Mostly legal counsel for oil companies.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ve got a boatful of dead lawyers?”

Connor actually grinned. “So one set of bloodsuckers took out another set of bloodsuckers?”

“Exactly,” Davidson said.

The three of us started back up the dock. All things considered, I suddenly didn’t feel as bad as I had. Still, whoever or whatever had done this had to be stopped. Connor and I parted ways with Davidson at the end of the pier, grabbed a cab, and headed downtown toward the office.