Knock: A Void City Novella Read online

  A stylized letter “G” in darker wood was inlaid with custom woodworking. Gabriella’s house. My smirk must have been turning into a grin, because my cheeks tightened and drew up. My gruesome claw-tipped hand grasped at the air, tightening into a fist as I reared back and... knocked loudly, hard enough to mar the wood, one single knock.

  Heh. This ain’t no big bad wolf blow the door down bullshit. This is classic Greek evil from way back. The terror that knocks once. All you have to do is not answer. These guys knew better than to answer, but who in the modern world believes in that crap even among Thralls? That’s not how being eaten works, right? The names of the Thralls in the house filled my head: Antoine, Margaret, Cecile, Bruce, Paulette, Fontaine, and Ezekiel.

  I called their names in that order, loudly, my voice shrill and chock-full of false fear. “Help me. I’m an ally of Gabriella’s. Hunters. They. Please! I offer a boon!”

  Paulette opened the door. Light cast her in mingled warm shades, her pale skin perfect, her chestnut hair in exquisite ringlets. Her eagerness hit me in a wave of human smells: sex and adrenaline. Eyes wide. Eager. Such pretty brown eyes. They met mine and I had her.

  “Quickly, I-“ Her voice caught as all the breath left her lungs and flowed into mine. In a blink, with the sun setting, but not yet down I stood in mortal mien, hale and hearty, full and sated.

  She was withered and seizing, but, miraculously -a sign of her mistress’s power- not dead... limbs twitching uncontrollably, mouth foaming, eyes not rolled up, but locked on mine she glared, her gaze an accusation.

  A mind, sleepy, feminine and angry brushed mine, but my kind only makes contact when we want. I did not care to talk.

  “On second thought,” I said, turning on my heel to walk away, “I’m fine. Tell your mistress... Tell her Eric Courtney says he doesn’t like her face and if she doesn’t stay out of his way, he’ll huff and he’ll puff and he’ll blow her house in.”

  I don’t know why I said that, but it felt like something Pops... Eric would say.

  “TTFN.” I gave a backward wave, listening to the others debate on what to do... whether they should attack me, save Paulette, or just crap their pants.

  Using my embarrassment of vitality, still drawing hard from Paulette until finally her Mistress let her go and the last of her vanished into me, I ripped the gates down and tossed them in the road behind Bacon’s Jeep. The clang hurt my ears, but doing it had felt right... for values of right encompassing actions that were clearly wrong to begin with...

  “What’s shakin’, Bacon?” I hopped back into the Jeep and gave her grin.

  “Really?” She asked.

  “You were the one who suggested it this morning on our way in.” I shrugged.

  “I asked if you’d ever tried it.” Bacon started the Jeep back up and drove back toward the Void City Gardens apartment complex.

  “Oh,” I said. “New answer. Yes. This one time after a particularly bad Saturday session at the Irons Club...”

  Bacon laughed. So did I, but not on the inside. Would Paulette become a Vrykolakas now? It was likely, if I didn’t take a few precautions. I opened Bacon’s glovebox looking for pen and paper, found a ballpoint and a little spiral notepad and made myself a reminder to track down her body by Tuesday night and end her properly before she rose.

  Gabriella’s Thrall. Damn. Well, at least I hadn’t picked on one of Winter’s Thralls. Shit. Shit. Shit!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Greta: Saturday Night isn’t Alright

  I woke up smelling funny. Not me personally, like in an icky corpse sweat way, but nostrils flaring wide before I was all the way awake. Either there is a magic apartment gnome who tucks me at dawn or Mom did it before she left. Probably Mom.

  Her smell: part old lady bathroom, cancer, cigarette smoke, and booze with a shot of hair dye and a touch of incontinence clung to a pillow on the right side of the bed and to the sheets. Aw! She’d tucked me in and slept over for a little while to make sure I had good dreams and vampire hunters didn’t get me. How sweet!

  Tossing the duvet to the floor, I rolled out of bed wearing Lucky Charm pajama bottoms and a matching t-shirt. The apparel implied Mom had done it, because I think a magic apartment gnome would have been more pervy and left me to wake up topless in a thong, but still. What if it were a female magic apartment gnome or a prudish one?

  I spied a note on the pillow that held Mom’s smell and snatched it up.

  Greta,

  I slept over a little. Enjoy the new pajamas. I saw them and thought they’d make a nice surprise.

  Love,

  Marilyn

  “No apartment gnomes, pervy or non,” I said. “Sigh.”

  Yawning for effect even though no one else was in my apartment, I headed for the fridge. When Mom stays over she usually restocks my snacks.

  Three gallons of blood with a note that said “Can you guess the blood types? (One of them is a mix) Your pajamas are the prize, so do your best and drink all three gallons because you’re already enjoying your winnings.”

  Another three gallons sat behind the first with a second note:

  “In case you need to get some work done. -M” M for Marilyn. M for Mom.

  I don’t like drinking old cold blood, but since I was already wearing my prize, I put a pot of water on the stove to warm, settling one of the gallons of blood in it. Some vampires pour the blood directly into a pan to heat, but you lose some that way.

  The other two gallons I drained in quick droughts. I know Dad says that there are vampires who can make do on a cup and a half of blood each day, but those vampires are obviously less creative shapeshifters than I. I’ve been full and sated exactly twice since choosing my second animal form. Once it happened by accident - I kind of went crazy in a football stadium. When it happened the second time, it was just to double check my math.

  If you’re wondering how much it took, the answer is one hundred and five gallons, three quarts, and one pint of blood... which is around eighty to ninety people or ten cows or seven horses, or roughly two elephants. But I can survive on a few gallons without going crazy... I’m just hungry all the time.

  While I waited on the third gallon to heat, I turned on the news, but they were talking about the death of Peter Jennings so I blipped until I found cartoons, but they were all the new kind with the really dumb art style, and I like the old ones better so I blipped over to CSI, gave up on it and started rewatching episodes of Supernatural. It’s a great show, so you just know they probably won’t let it have more than a couple of seasons.

  I’d almost put the funny smell out of my head and was finishing up the third gallon while Sam and Dean were all cute and monster fighty when the odor hit me again. It reeked of fur and wolves and hillbillies. Writing down my blood type guesses so I wouldn’t forget, I swapped my pajamas for a hot pink “Welcome to the Void” t-shirt and jeans.

  Dad loves those t-shirts and I like them, too. They used to say “Welcome to the Void City Music Festival” on the front, but one year Dad told them he’d buy a whole case of them if they put City Music Festival on the back with the year and the list of bands and left the front reading “Welcome to the Void”. He tells everyone that the guys did it by accident, but I think he is just trying to be modest, because everyone else liked it so much better. Besides, I told the organizers I would kill them all if they ever went back to the old way.

  But I digress... Where was I? Oh yeah, wolf stank. You smell a whole lot of stuff you don’t want to smell when you’re a vampire from bathroom smells to nummy cooking smells and if you don’t want to go crazy you learn to filter them out... and I do, but I am at least a little crazy, so I don’t block as much as I probably should.

  By the time I had on socks and sneakers, I thought I had their sounds picked out, too.

  “There should be two,” an overly Southern voice was saying, “a boy and a girl. William wants them both.”

  “Weird,” I said to the empty apartment, “why do werewolves
want me and Kyle?” There were two good ways to handle this. My favorite would have been to go out there and kill all the werewolves, but I was already in trouble with Dad and sort of kind of banished and while I knew Dad was okay with killing humans for food, he has some pretty strong rules about werewolves.

  He says if you kill one werewolf then you have to kill the whole pack and he doesn’t want to do that, so I guessed I shouldn’t want to do it either. And since I shouldn’t want to kill the werewolves I actually wanted to kill, that meant I had to use the other, more expensive option.

  Chugging the gallon of warmed blood sent a feeling of heat seeping throughout my torso. Not enough to really spread evenly and hit my extremities, but still nice. I had to rummage through two kitchen drawers until I found my super long clicky lighter, I knew exactly where my Hand of Glory was. The stupid things are super freaking expensive, but there are times when you aren’t allowed to murder things or you’ll get grounded. Then, Super Magic Batman Fun Time is worth the money.

  I still don’t know why the Mage’s Guild charges so much for the stupid things. I even hanged my own dude!

  The creepy pickled deadman’s hand was in the drawer of my bedside table right next to the candle we’d made out of the hanged man’s fat. Store bought candles are way easier to come by, but sometimes you need the real thing. As I set the candle in the deadman’s palm, its fingers gripped the wax tightly letting me hold the Hand of Glory by its severed wrist. Carefully, I lit the candle’s human hair wick.

  “I hope you’re worth the hundred grand you cost me, Norbert.” I don’t think Norbert was really the dead guy’s name, but the severed hand looked like a Norbert to me.

  When lit, the candle cast an eerie silver light and burned with a green flame... so that was encouraging. I’d hate to have spent all that money and been bamboozled. “Let’s go test you out on some furry rednecks!”

  Tempted as I was to wait until they’d broken down my front door - because how funny would it have been to have a whole line of werewolves walking in, seeing the Hand of Glory, and then freezing and falling over - I was worried they might find Kyle first and I’d be an awful big sister if I let my brother die just to play werewolf dominoes. Plus, this way, maybe they wouldn’t figure out which apartment was mine and wreck it.

  “The Thrall who called William works for one of those High Society leeches,” a different voice said. “Couldn’t say which apartment, just that they both live here in Void City Gardens.”

  Ha! And to think I’d been so sure the extra two hundred for “location obfuscation” was a fancy term for a bribe, I thought. I owe Mrs. Anat an apology.

  Aja Anat, other than having a perfect name for a Stan Lee-era comic book character, is my landlady. She has tons of extras she could throw in when renting to supernatural customers ranging from sunproof glass to alternative living environments. She’s always been nice to me; didn’t bat an eyelash at dead tenants (so long as they were human and the Fang Fee was paid for). I think she’s super pretty for someone who’s supposed to be one quarter Gorgon on her father’s side.

  Now I regretted not having paid the extra for full location impossibility. My current option made it almost impossible for someone hunting me to find my apartment during the day, but only somewhat difficult to find it at night. People wanting to hurt me would be unable to remember my apartment number or smell me or even read my address were it to be written down.

  Anyone who wanted to beat the location out of Mrs. Anat would find themselves unable to locate the apartment complex at all and usually ended up in Birmingham outside of the Cheesecake Factory at The Summit.

  But back to the werewolves. I let myself out of the apartment, making sure to lock it behind me, and started out for Kyle’s apartment. Saturday night is his stupid board game night, so I knew he’d be home. He won’t even hunt on a game night. Usually I boycott it on general principle, but tonight he clearly wasn’t going to have the option to stay in.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Greta: Glorious

  Twelve werewolves roamed parking lots in pairs going from apartment building to apartment building smelling for us. Each building in Void City Gardens is a three story twelve unit apartment plan with an open central hallway between the units on opposite sides on each level. Five sets of apartment buildings are close to the front office and across from the swimming pool, tennis courts, and workout room. There are another eight up a slight hill around to the right and eight more up a larger hill on the left.

  Even with the extra location obfuscation, it wasn’t going to take them that long to find me even if they went all in a group and these guys were splitting up. About half of these guys had gray fur, the others going to darker or lighter shades of brindle and brown. My apartment building was up the hill. Kyle’s was down.

  Like most apartment complexes in the South, the building planners had left lots of wooded area (mostly pine trees here) to help the homes feel more like they were woodsy, baffle sound, and give a better view than the nearest strip mall or office park. Using the tree line as cover, I sprinted down the back of my building and down the hill toward building three.

  One gray and one brown werewolf were padding up to the second floor of Kyle’s building so I leapt up to the balcony of Kyle’s rear neighbor across the hall and walked through the apartment, snapping the lock on the sliding glass door with a good hard vampire tug. His neighbors (Todd 1 and Todd 2 because I couldn’t remember their names) were curled up on the couch watching TV.

  They froze there, one Todd with a piece of popcorn halfway to his lips and the other in the middle of lighting a cigarette. Still as statues! Yes! Norbert works on humans! I plucked the lighter from Todd 2’s fingers so that he wouldn’t burn himself. Then I ripped his throat out to see if the blood tasted different when a person was paralyzed by the Hand of Glory.

  It didn’t.

  I thought the paralysis was supposed to work until somebody poured milk on the candle to extinguish it or until it burned down, but I drained Todd 1 too so he wouldn’t give me away with a whole bunch of screaming if the magic let him go. Either that or I was just hungry. Either is equally likely. With Todd 1, I was paying closer attention and I noticed the arterial spray actually did take a second or two to really get going like a faucet where the water drips, stops, then goes full blast.

  Good to know.

  Now to test Norbert out on werwolves! The warmth from the Todds had me feeling all pink and warm, not full, but more full than usual so I started humming Henry Mancici’s “Pink Panther Theme” as I stalked by prey.

  “I smell vampire,” one said.

  “I smell shapeshifter,” the other one said.

  My two lucky werewolf contestants were outside Kyle’s door when I threw open the Todds’ apartment door and shouted, “Hello, puppies!”

  They didn’t seem happy to see me at all. The look was frozen on their muzzles plain as day. All curled snarly muzzles, eyes wide, and clenched fists. Not friendly. Not nice.

  “You guys aren’t fully appreciative of how much money I spent to not have to kill you right now.”

  Kyle was obviously oblivious inside. He could probably take on one werewolf if the magic stopped working, well, more like half a werewolf, but whatever... so I picked up a frozen werewolf as I headed for the roof. More werewolves were coming this way.

  Silver light from the Hand of Glory made the fur on the werewolf I was carrying flicker and dance. In the rooms below my feet humans stirred or looked up at the ceiling as my sneakers tread their roofing tiles. There are few greater joys than playing with new toys. Ears primed for any sign the wolf I’d left behind might start to awaken, I eavesdropped on the next pair. Two down. Ten to go.

  “Did you hear something?”

  “I hear lots of things, Lee. You want to be more specific?”

  “I can’t be,” Lee said. “It was just some kind of scuffling. And maybe someone said, ‘Puppies’.”

  On the wrong side of the lower parking
lot, Lee and his scouting buddy both sniffed the air, scenting me or the wolf I was holding. It reminded me of childhood games like hide and seek, but an awesome variant where when the seekers find the hider they still lose. My heart never beats, but an equivalent thrill of excitement filled my chest, a thrum of anticipation. Timing and numbers added to it. If I played too long more puppies would come play with me (Yay!) but if there were too many puppies (Boo!) they might come up with a plan.

  Their plan wouldn’t work, but if I won the fight by killing all the puppies, I’d still lose by making Dad even angrier with me… because I won the fight and killed all the puppies. Catch-22! Boo!

  “It’s ironic, puppies,” I whispered. Sharp intakes of breath. Pointed ears flicked this way and that.

  “Roof,” Lee growled. Used to working in tandem, they split approaches, one climbing up each side of the apartment building. One came up the front, the other the rear. Claws gripped the roof, eyes shone in the reflected light of my Hand of Glory… and before I could hurl the one I was carrying at one of his buddies, they froze and fell. Twin thuds in the night.

  Four down. This was easy! This was so easy Kyle could do it!

  I chewed my lower lip. Running through the other parking lots waving Norbert at them would stop the other puppies, but it also felt… boring… and when you’ve spent a hundred thousand dollars, you really want to have a hundred thousand dollars worth of fun.

  Oooh! Idea!

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kyle: Playing with Puppies?

  Greta kicked open my apartment door waving a dead man’s hand with a candle in its grip, freezing me in place, aware, yet immobile. Blood wet the front of her shirt as if she’d been pelted with blood-filled balloons all scoring direct hits to the chest, highlighting her lack of a bra. She’s not always the most careful feeder, but it looked almost as if the arterial spray had surprised her somehow.