Hi, Fang.
He didn’t immediately reply. I waited a few minutes, my clawed fingers hovering over the keyboard. The image of a gargoyle perched on the ledge of an old building came to mind. For some reason, I smiled.
No, she smiled. She liked dark things, disturbing things. Granted, gargoyles were hardly the things of nightmares. No, she was pleased that her thoughts were so quickly coming to the surface. That her thoughts were mingling easily with my own.
I shook my head again, fought off a brief wave of panic, and typed: You there, Fang?
A minute passed. My house was so quiet that I could literally hear my kids’ heartbeats. Anthony’s beat a little slower than Tammy’s. Was that because of the vampire blood in him? My heartbeat rate was only a fraction of that of a human’s. Had I committed my son to a lifetime of making excuses for who he was, and why he was different? Maybe. But the alternative was far, far worse. Better a lifetime of excuses than no life at all.
Not too long ago, the thing within had tried to escape using another means: procuring all four magical medallions, medallions meant to help vampires battle that which lives within them. At least, that was what the alchemist Librarian had told me, and Archibald Maximus should know, since he had created the medallions in the first place. Like all things in life, there was a loophole, a way for something good to be used for something bad. Turns out, the collecting of all four medallions at once could also release the demons within. On a desolate island in the Pacific Northwest, I had been lured to my destruction. That hadn’t quite happened, and my son, who had actually consumed one of the medallions in a liquefied form, could live on.
And live on he did, growing faster than other boys his age, stronger than other boys his age, and, if you asked me and his older sister, gassier than other boys his age.
I almost smiled. The thing within me didn’t want me to smile. It didn’t like innocent jokes. It didn’t like humor.
“Well, fuck you,” I said, and smiled anyway.
And that was when the AOL chatbox flickered and the status read: “Fang950 is typing.”
* * *
Hello, Moon Dance.
Fang and I used to have a strong telepathic link. So strong that we could often hear each other’s thoughts over a great distance. Now, since becoming a fellow creature of the night, that link was broken. He was inaccessible to me, and that was a loss greater to me than I was willing to admit.
You are up late, Fang, I typed.
Or early, he wrote back almost immediately.
I smiled, pleased to see some of his old personality coming through. My last memory of Fang had been troubling at best. He was robotic, lifeless, and, if you asked me, lost.
Now that I had him, I wasn’t sure what to say to him. It had been many months since we had last spoken, and many more before that when our relationship was irrevocably changed. After some false starts, I finally wrote: Still a vampire?
Or something.
I nodded to myself. Yes, being a vampire wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. A host was more accurate.
Where you living now?
In L.A.’s Echo Park district.
Still bartending?
I almost, almost sensed him laughing, but probably not. He would have laughed at that, but not anymore.
No, Moon Dance.
Okay, I’ll bite. No pun intended. What are you doing for work these days?
I don’t need to work, Sam.
I nodded to myself, suddenly getting it. Hanner left you money. Probably a lot of money.
Something like that.
Of course, Hanner wouldn’t have had a traditional will, not when she was over a century old. Besides, whoever heard of a vampire having a will? More than likely, Hanner had simply given Fang access to her accumulated wealth. Probably the case with other vampires, with money being passed to each new generation of bloodsuckers. I was probably the only idiot vampire who actually worked. For all I knew, Fang was sitting on top of a pile of gold, stolen and stockpiled by the ageless and undead. No doubt stolen and looted from countless victims. Or, even better, just given to them by compelled victims.
I could do something similar, I knew. I could, with some training, stand outside the local Bank of America, and compel all those who came and went to empty their savings accounts for me. In fact, it would probably be easy to do.
Indeed, the entity within me perked up at this line of thinking. Yes, she and her kind were used to living this way, of manipulating and exploiting and destroying.
I pushed her out of my mind, or as far out as I could.
So, you do nothing, then? I asked him. Just sitting around and drinking goblets of blood?
Oh, there is much I do, Sam. Some things I can talk about, some I can’t.
You are setting up another blood bank, I wrote. No, I might not be able to read his mind anymore, but I was also a trained investigator who happened to be pretty good at her job.
Yes, Sam, but it’s not what you think.
And what am I thinking?
That we are killing people, draining them dry, like Robert Mason did in Fullerton.
And Hanner, I said. Let’s not forget her role.
Indeed, her role had been to help the murders slip through the cracks, to help the police forget, to hide and manipulate the facts.
Fang was writing something, and then paused. I knew this because the words “Fang950 is typing” had been flashing in the upper corner and then it quit flashing. I really didn’t know what he was going to write, but a part of me thought he might have been about to defend Hanner.
He loved her, I suddenly thought. He loved her and he’d killed her...
Killed her for me.
I knew that Hanner and Fang had been close. I knew that she had taught him the ins and outs of vampirism, something that had never been taught to me. Hell, it still seemed I was learning something new every day.
Yeah, it stood to reason that the very creature who had turned him, trained him, and fed him in his early days would be the object of his affection.
I got it. I understood it. I was sure it would have happened to anyone.
But that didn’t stop me from feeling jealous.
And yeah, I got all of this from a simple hesitation, a simple pregnant pause. It might as well have been pregnant with twins.
Whatever that meant.
Anyway, after his telling hesitation, he started writing again. The Hanner operation was flawed, he wrote. Most of the victims didn’t have to die.
Most? I wrote. Wouldn’t it be more human to say that “none of them needed to die”?
Yes, of course. I was loose with my speech. Or with my fingertips.
I nearly asked what else he was loose with. It was a damn good thing Fang couldn’t read my mind.