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  Time was passing. Obviously I was out of it, or I would have done something, moved, blinked. Maybe it was the shock of being dead and bodiless. I think that’s the real reason angry ghosts can go so long without outbursts. Things start to run together; one hour bleeds into the next. One day. One month. I lost count.

  When you’re alive, time flies when you’re having fun. In death, time flies if you don’t grab it with both hands and hang on tight. During my reverie, things changed. People came and left. The remains of the Demon Heart were covered in a light dusting of snow. We don’t get snow often in Void City. A half inch of snow on the ground means no school, closed roads, and thousands of tiny snowmen flecked with grass and dirt.

  It was the snow that snapped me out of it, that and the sight of a classic Mustang convertible parked on the street in front of me. Not just any Mustang, either—my Mustang. I love that car. Damn werewolves had wrecked it, trying to get at me over what was really Roger trouble. It had cost me a fortune to have it put back together, but I just couldn’t live without it.

  My daughter Greta, a blond Amazon, stood next to the car. She had my mechanic, Carl, with her. My Mustang was hooked to the back of his wrecker. He’d finished the repairs beautifully; with ghost-vision, I couldn’t tell it’d been wrecked. Between the two of them stood my hired mage, Magbidion, a crazy little magician who was always hitting me up for protection.

  Magbidion’s hands were cupped over his right eye. He twisted and turned them like a photographer focusing his camera. “Try to start it again,” Magbidion yelled over his shoulder. “I think we have his attention.”

  Carl climbed into the car and turned the key. “Nothing.” He climbed back out. “I don’t understand it.”

  “I do,” Magbidion muttered. “Assuming his place of power really is his car, then it won’t run unless we bring him back. Conversely, if we can manage to start the engine and keep it running, then he’ll re-form. He’s tied to it—linked. Goddess, but he must love this car.” An idea lit up behind Magbidion’s eyes, and I watched him dismiss it out of hand. “We’ve tried everything else. If this doesn’t work, then we’re going to have to rebuild the whole Demon Heart.”

  Magbidion is a smart magician, even if he is a little needy. He got his powers from a demon in exchange for his soul. Now that he’s getting near his expiration date, Mags wants a little muscle on his side to try to renegotiate the contract. I don’t know how many times I’ve turned him down. If he could get my body back for me, though, then he might have a deal. Heck, I might even make him my thrall.

  “We’ve got to make him mad.”

  “Shit,” said Greta, “if Dad knew that Tabitha was shacking up with that bigwig up at the Highland Towers, we wouldn’t need to—”

  The Mustang’s engine roared.

  “I see him,” Magbidion shouted.

  “She’s shacking up with who, where?” I snarled.

  Greta ran forward. “You can see him? Can he hear me? Daddy?”

  She ran right past me. Some vampires have to be in one of their animal forms to detect ghosts. Others can’t see them at all. Greta is ghostblind. I wish I was.

  “We’re missing something,” Magbidion yelled as the engine died. “I don’t know why I was wasting my time on the Pollux. You were right, Greta, he’s definitely invested in the car, but we’re missing something. What am I forgetting?”

  “Answer my question, Mags!” I shouted. “Tabitha broke up with me, what, a day ago, and she’s already shacking up with some asshole?”

  “Just try to stay mad and give me a few minutes.” Mags closed his eyes and sat down on the curb. “The body creation ritual didn’t work with the Pollux, because the car is really his place of power…But the ritual didn’t work with the car, either.” He gestured with his hands while he spoke. “Why not? Something must be different about the car. What’s different? What is the fundamental difference between a car and a building?”

  “Cars have wheels,” Greta answered.

  “Cars move around,” Carl suggested. “You drive them, steer them.”

  Right on cue, as if she timed it that way, I saw Rachel. I don’t know if it was because she was my thrall, but she looked brighter to me, the red of her lips more red, the very essence of what red means. Her smell, a mixture of cinnamon and sex, wrapped itself around me and didn’t let go, the first scent I’d experienced as a ghost. She wore hip-hugger jeans, a white crop top, and a black leather jacket. The cold accentuated her bralessness. In her hand she carried a red gas can.

  “Cars eat,” she said. “Cars run on gas. Vampires have different needs, but they still require fuel.” Rachel paused and shook the gas can as she spoke, blood sloshing up the side and seeping back down. “Eric runs on blood. Feed the car what Eric needs and you nourish Eric through their connection.” She gestured at me, then at the Mustang. “Nourish Eric and he can rebuild his body. He does it every time he changes into an animal and back, but he needs blood to fuel the transformation.”

  Magbidion wiped sweat from his forehead with a cotton handkerchief. “I put blood in the car! All over the backseat.”

  “You put what all over the backseat of my car?” I shouted. Staying mad was not a problem.

  “But you didn’t feed it.” Rachel wrinkled her nose at Mags and he stood up quickly, backpedaling. “You don’t put the gas in the backseat, you put it in the tank.”

  “I’m not sure what that would do,” he stammered. “Let me clean the car, modify the ritual. There’s too much magic wrapped up in the body-creation spell to continue safely. And we’ll need human blood, not—”

  “It is human blood.” Greta, Rachel, and I all spoke at once. I could feel it through the can. I wanted it, needed it, which meant something they were doing was working. If anyone ever asks you what vampires really are, tell them I told you we’re a bunch of worthless junkies, eternally jonesing for our next fix. The hunger hadn’t been there after the explosion, but it was back now.

  “Where’d you get it?” Mags asked.

  “Sweetheart Row,” Rachel answered.

  It was a lie. My spectral eyes saw phantom blood on her hands. She’d washed it away, but the stain remained. She hadn’t gotten the blood from Sweetheart Row. Think of The Row as a red-light district just for vampires. For the right price, the girls of Sweetheart Row would give blood, sex, or both at the same time, but the phantom blood on Rachel’s hands felt more like murder than a business transaction. More things I didn’t want to know.

  All the anger about Tabitha subsided. I missed her, but there was no sense beating myself up about it. If she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, why did I give a rat’s ass who she fucked? And to be honest, I was sleeping with her younger sister. Rachel is the kind of little sister all boyfriends dream about.

  “We’re losing him,” Mags shouted. “Someone piss him off again. Pour some of that blood on him.”

  Ignoring his orders, Rachel started pouring blood into the gas tank of the Mustang. Greta snatched the gas can away, the force of her action spinning Rachel around and knocking her to the asphalt. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “The car is a place of power for him. He loves it. He had sex with the woman he was going to marry in it. When the car got wrecked, he was as pissed off about losing it as he might have been about losing a child. He has no body. I’ve sprayed blood all over this damn wreck of a strip club, and none of these ashes are his.” Rachel pulled herself up off the ground.

  “Whoever planned this,” she continued, “completely obliterated Eric’s remains. So he can only re-form in his strongest place of power. I went along with you guys on the whole movie theater idea. I told you it wouldn’t work and it didn’t. The Pollux is just too damn big to be a memento mori.”

  I may not speak many other languages, but Latin I remember from school. Memento mori, in English: remember your death.

  “A what?” Mags asked.

  Rachel’s finger pointed at Magbidion, but her eyes looked directly int
o Greta’s. “You had your shot! Now let me try this. If it doesn’t work, then we can always go get more blood for the next big idea.”

  Reluctantly, Greta emptied the rest of the blood into the car.

  “Carl’s just going to have to drain the gas tank,” I said. “You guys are all fucked in the head. This is never going to work.”

  “Just give it a second, Eric,” Magbidion said. At least he could hear me.

  “Now what?” Greta asked softly.

  “We piss him off.” Rachel beamed. “We make him want to have hands so that he can strangle us with them. Where is he?”

  Magbidion pointed me out to her, but I really thought she’d seen me all along. Hadn’t she pointed at me or had I imagined that? I stood in the midst of the rubble where El Alma Perdida had been. It was gone. Maybe the Lone Stranger had better things to do and had taken the gun with him. Fine with me.

  Magbidion resorted to the equivalent of “yo’ mama” jokes, and Greta didn’t fare much better, but Rachel knew just how to piss me off. She pulled a sharpened piece of wood out of her purse and jammed it through Greta’s heart from behind.

  I’m very protective of Greta. I’d brave daylight for her; I’ve done it more than once. Greta, like me, is one of those lucky vamps who is only immobilized by a stake through the heart, not actually destroyed by it. I knew she’d be fine, but I got mad anyway.

  Getting angry doesn’t usually hurt, but I felt like a potato being peeled. The Mustang’s engine revved. My heart beat once. Beginning with the center of my field of vision, the world unraveled and rewove itself into normalcy. Gone was the surreal vision; in its place, colors and clarity reigned supreme.

  “It’s working,” Rachel shouted.

  “Something’s wrong,” Magbidion said slowly, drawing out the words so that wrong took two syllables. “I told you to let me cleanse the vehicle. The magic is interacting with another spell.”

  When Greta was a kid, I used to buy her little pellet toys that expanded in warm water, getting bigger and bigger until you could tell what kind of vehicle they really were. That’s what it felt like. I’ve re-formed from ashes before and it doesn’t happen the way this did. A piercing scream escaped my re-formed mouth. The Mustang’s horn honked wildly and all four tires spun in impossible directions.

  Suddenly I was sitting behind the wheel of my beloved Mustang. Carl’s rusty-ass tow truck was a sight for sore eyes…and I do mean literally sore. My heart was beating again, while air ripped in and out of my lungs. I wasn’t just back amongst the undead; I was really alive!

  “Oh, shit!” Magbidion cursed. “Everyone get away from the car!”

  Then I was reliving the worst wreck I’d ever been in. I had been coming around the sharp turn on Duggan Road out near Marilyn’s house, driving Roger’s car, but in this memory, I was driving my Mustang. The warning sign says to take the turn at fifteen miles per hour, but, being speed-limit-sign dyslexic, I always took it at fifty-one. When I died the first time, it had been because Roger tampered with the brakes, and I found out firsthand that if you crash through the guardrail on that turn and have enough speed going, you have an amazing view of the quarry.

  This time it was different. When I get extremely mad and black out, I turn into a large coal-skinned creature with leathery bat wings and glowing purple eyes. Now that I have a thrall, I can turn into it pretty much at will. In the new memory, the uber vamp sat in the passenger’s seat, smoke trailing off of his skin as it popped and hissed in the sunlight.

  “It’s about fucking time,” the uber vamp said. It grabbed the wheel, stomped its clawed foot over my own, jammed the gas pedal to the floor, and purposefully steered us through the guardrail and over the cliff. As we soared through the air, the paint job changed from black to red, then the uber vamp faded, leaving me alone to face the sudden stop at the end.

  When I hit bottom, I flashed back to the present, but the damage to my car was real. The steering wheel had broken in half, and the steering column was shoved up and partially into my chest. My Mustang had re-enacted the wreck all over the street between the Pollux and the Demon Heart. My legs were crushed in a mass of accordioned metal. Lacerations from the windshield glass covered my face and upper body…Memento mori. Remember my death. Fuck Latin!

  When it was finally over, Magbidion ran for the car and tried to pull me out, so he was up close and personal for what happened next. Later he’d tell me that I was dead for over a minute, but I never lost consciousness. I remember the steering column pulling back, the collapsed roof straightening, every dent and ding popping out smoothly as the whole car essentially fixed itself. My heart shuddered, then stopped, my skin cooled, and I was a vampire again…undamaged except for the whole undead angle.

  Other than the paint job changing from black to red, my Mustang seemed to be none the worse for wear. I stepped out of the car, and Rachel jumped into my arms, pulling my head toward her neck. I drank; the hunger subsided, and Rachel sagged against me.

  “I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Magbidion laughed. “You weren’t made in the traditional way, Eric. What happened just now…when we resurrected you…is that you came back as a human. There is a slim chance with the ritual we used that such a thing can happen, but then another spell intervened.”

  “What kind of spell?”

  “It’s so complex, so powerful, that I couldn’t tell you. I think it was some kind of curse—very primal and old—probably two hundred years at least.”

  “And it gave me a supernatural bitch-slap back into the realm of the undead?”

  “That’s not how I would have put it, but yeah.”

  I unstaked Greta, kept her from killing Rachel (which wasn’t hard once she realized why Rachel had staked her) and sat with the group of them on the snow-covered sidewalk.

  “So…I wasn’t embraced or turned or whatever by another vampire, but by some kind of curse.”

  Magbidion nodded.

  “So I don’t have a sire?”

  “Yes and no,” the mage sighed. His hands twisted around his eye again, but the circle through which he looked was smaller than before. “If I focus, I can usually tell who sired a vampire. When I look at you that way, there is an indistinct figure and I get the impression this person is a vampire. It’s as if the curse made you his or her offspring.”

  “Can you tell who cursed me?”

  “No.” He focused even more tightly. There was a loud pop, a spark, and Magbidion fell over backward. “Ow.” Smoke trailed away from his fingers and he rubbed his eye. “Do you remember tastes?”

  I nodded.

  “You know how people say that x or y tastes like chicken, but it isn’t chicken? It’s really duck or alligator or snake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It isn’t magic. It tastes like magic, but it isn’t magic. It’s cleaner, purer. Maybe it is just a kind of magic I’ve never encountered before.”

  “One more question: Why is my car red?”

  “It could be a side effect.” Magbidion shrugged. “The car was subjected to a great deal of magic, conventional and otherwise. The curse touched it, too, re-creating the accident in which you died….”

  He put a hand on the hood. It revved its engine at him, screeched into reverse, and backed across the street. Magbidion hit the asphalt in front of the Mustang and it flicked on its high beams.

  “Mags, do not tell me that my car—”

  “That’s so cool, Dad!” Greta shouted. “You have a vampire car! I always wanted a vampire car! Can we name it Fang?”

  “Fang the ’Stang,” I grumbled. “Somebody shoot me.”

  9

  ERIC: PROBLEM NUMBER TWO

  Nobody seemed to know what would happen to Fang if the sun hit it, so I parked in the old Bateman’s Department Store deck next to Magbidion’s RV, where the sun couldn’t get at my ’Stang and where Mags could keep an eye on it. Bateman’s burned back in the seventies, and I
bought their deck since it adjoined the Pollux anyway.

  Green, red, blue, and yellow lights dotted the outside of the Pollux and the interior railings. I always decorated for Christmas, and in my absence, someone had done it for me. Usually I would close the Demon Heart and all the girls would come over for a bit of nonworking Yuletide revelry. Yeah, Christmas. I guess my ghostly eyes had stared at the sun for four whole months. I could have stared at it for another eight.

  My flocked white Christmas tree stood proud and tall in the center of the lobby, decked in the same bubble lights I used every year. The star, a silver contraption made of tinfoil and popsicle sticks, waited on the edge of the concession counter where Greta put it every year. Whether we were on good or bad terms, there was always Christmas.

  Greta’s my biggest failure and one of my greatest loves. She made the star for me on our first Christmas together, back when she was still alive. A ten-year-old girl and a sixty-year-old vampire don’t have much in common, but we did have Christmas. I don’t remember exactly what happened anymore, what her foster parents had done, but I remember that it had been bad and that I’d taken care of it. Afterward it had seemed natural that she stay with me. If I’d stuck to my guns and kept her human, she’d be in her thirties now…I think…but I hadn’t lasted much more than a decade before giving in.

  I turned into a bat, grabbed the star with my feet, and dropped it into place (which is exactly as hard as it sounds) before flying upstairs. Rachel followed me up, but I wasn’t in the mood for sex and I certainly wasn’t in the mood for Rachel. I wanted Marilyn, but she was gone. She was gone and there was something I was supposed to do about it…something important. A nagging thought haunted the cobwebbed corridors of my bat brain. It darted between thoughts about what or who Tabitha was doing and hid behind filing cabinets when I tried to look straight at it. I was forgetting something. I’m always forgetting something.