‘If
you could do anything you wanted with this old pile, darling, what would you do?’
‘What does it matter, Rosie?’
‘Oh, come now, being gloomy is my job, I’m the English one. And we have to kill time somehow.’
‘Well, what would you do?’
‘Nothing, dear boy; I’d steal every last cent, buy a ship, and do what I did before Our Dutchman burned The Audacious Mare to cinders.’
‘Tsk. I don’t think it is possible to be a pirate in the 21st century—not with a ship.’
‘Nonsense! What is a cruise ship but a floating buffet of juicy aristocrats, helpless as a first-rater in a slight breeze?’
‘Nobody carries cash anymore, Rosie.’
‘But they do carry blood, my dear…!’
‘Do either of you ever stop talking!’
A silver tray whirred through the air to ricochet off the bars; the two vampires glanced sideways at one another for the briefest of seconds, then the one with black curls threaded with silver said, as though nothing had happened: ‘Why, Rosie, I thought you hated a mess.’
‘I do, dear boy, I do, but you see, I am rather peckish, and—’
They were interrupted again by an ursine roar from the same person that had thrown the tray. ‘If you two don’t shut up, I’m going to—’
There was, beneath the werebear’s roar, the sound of a door opening; she sat back down, turning away and lowering her head in fear, huffing her breath as her master came down the steps.
Pointed boots of crocodile leather stopped at the silver tray, and hands with a vampire’s pointed claws picked it up, turning it over and observing the dents, the warping, from how hard it had been thrown.
‘Sorry, sir,’ the bear said, quickly, her eyes on the floor.
‘Why is my tray dented, Izegrim?’
There was only a terrified moan in response. It was a wretched sight, a grizzly bear being terrified.
‘I asked you a question, Izegrim,’ was only slightly louder, but the werebear flinched as though it had been the crack of a whip.
‘I…th-threw it sir,’ she said, very quietly.
‘You threw it,’ was ever-so-slightly louder.
‘At the fledge, sir, they were being—’
‘What did I tell you to do, Izegrim?’ was spoken over her.
‘G-guard them, sir.’
‘Guard them,’ he said, nodding. ‘Aye, I thought that’s what I said. Count yourself lucky I am pressed for time, Izegrim, or it would be your hide on the floor in front of my fire for this.’ He slammed the tray suddenly against the bars, and the vampire with the dark curls couldn’t help but jump; he grinned, seeing it. ‘Bring my fat blackbird,’ he said.
The other vampire had pale hair just slightly tinged with red, and knew there was little he could actually do to stop the werebear; but he was an English bastard, so he had to try—he threw himself between her and his French companion, the boy he should have turned all those centuries ago; he fought, but even a vampire fighting a grizzly was like a paper sail in a storm. She threw him aside, and he hit the stone wall so hard there was a crack of bone.
There was a laugh from their captor, as he lit his meerschaum pipe, the curves of the naked woman making up the figural carving highlighted from centuries of tobacco smoke. The long gold mustaches, walrus-like, did not hide the smile that spread a fan of crow’s feet around the pale blue eyes in that still-sunburnt red face. ‘What, no clever words now that your pet molly is silent?’
There was no glare, but the wince of pain as the shoulder was rolled back into place was still visible, English stiff upper lip or no; but after, that chin was held high. ‘Does a raven waste breath on a frog?’ came the retort, and it wasn’t because it would get the better of their captor—that had no effect anymore—but it was for the way he knew the double-entendre would cheer up his dear friend, slung over the werebear’s shoulder like so much meat. There would be no laugh, but he wasn’t a joey, to require one—he knew one was in the boy’s heart. It was the last gift he could give, if they were truly to never see one another again.
As the door closed, he let himself slump down onto the stone of the floor again, leaning against the stone of the grotto wall, and drop his head back onto it. He couldn’t waste precious blood on tears, he thought firmly to himself, he couldn’t afford it…
One slipped out anyway.
⁂
As they wended through the long-forgotten smuggling tunnel, the vampire slung over the werebear’s shoulder had a few minutes to think. Many younger than him might have been frantically trying to come up with a plan of escape, or wondering what was to happen; he, however, had no illusions of so much power.
He was wondering what he really would have done with his master’s property. His master had retired on a pile of silver and gold, and had made it back many more times since, on the backs of the whores he had owned since coming ashore in Baltimore. The part of the grotto above high tide was where he kept his possessions when he wanted them not to be found; that included both the precious metals and gems… and The Cage. They were all of them broken by time alone in the cage, usually separated so they couldn’t keep one another unbroken with company. But his master had been getting… odd, lately. Not erratic so much as taking new steps, having new confidence that seemed backed by a real increase in power.
What did he want to do with it all? What could you do with it, other than sell it and commission a ship? Well, he’d do that, he thought; and with the rest, perhaps… retire from working on his back?
Did he even know what else to do with himself?
These thoughts were interrupted as they emerged from the tunnel into a large karst cavern, and he was slammed onto a table, hard enough that he heard something crack and then he suddenly couldn’t move. The first time that had happened, he’d felt terror as he’d never known; but this was not the first time his back had been broken by rough handling. He lay paralysed as he heard his master’s voice speaking a language he did not know and which his master’s Dutch accent was not equipped to handle, and could only watch as the ceiling above went from ordinary dark to a sort of dark that also had a purplish quality to it, as though it were something else around the edges, something sideways—and the air went from dank and tinged with limestone to something salty, decayed, familiar—
And cold.
⁂
‘Hey buddy, good to see you finally!’ Aix said, as he woke up in the flashing dark he’d only ever seen in a documentary about the deepest deeps. He got up, realised he had a merrow-tail like the ones he’d drawn all the time, and knew exactly what to do with it, not feeling horror at his legs being gone at all; quite the contrary—his legs had been holding him back for years. He kicked his tail, swimming up and circling around the hugeness of the being that had called him, stopping at the level of that cluster of orange eyes.
Curiosity, as more of them blinked open, the pupils all focussing on him. He waved.
‘Wow, so you’re way down here at the bottom huh? Are you at the deepest part of the sea, do you know? Cos I know where that is.’
There was movement that caused more than bioluminescent fish to flash—bioluminescence was green or blue, it wasn’t usually violet, or accompanied by the rattle of chains. ‘Whoa!’ Aix said, darting backward, then swimming toward where he’d seen the light. ‘Do that again?’
The being moved its whale-sized bulk, and Aix shot back down to the sea-floor, using a technique he’d seen fish use to make the sand move, uncovering lines of violet light in the sand. ‘Is this… how you’re trapped?’ he murmured, as he followed the lines, until they all connected, glowing brighter. He swam up, pausing at the eyes. ‘Hang on, buddy, I want a better look at the big picture.’
It was so big he had to keep swimming up, and up, and up—and then something went sideways, and a tentacle shot up, wrapping around him, pulling him back down, and—
He was suddenly gasping awake, pushing up his eye-mask and groping for his glasses as he heaved himself up carefully, a surge of urgency taking over. He was on his feet and out of his room and nearly out the door before he quite literally collided into someone in the hallway.
‘Aix?’
‘Mike we have to go to Baltimore, he needs me, he needs my help—’
‘Whoa, Aix, I don’t speak French that well, what are you saying?’
‘René, his name is René, I need to go to Baltimore something is happening in Baltimore he needs my help he needs it right now!’
Mike didn’t need to speak much French to hear the names Baltimore and René and ‘aid’ and put it together, but her stomach dropped, blood chill.
‘Aix—Aix, please breathe.’
There was a shadow on the stair, a curvy figure with moon-pale skin. Lady Sitrinne, Mike thought; she spoke French.
‘Come, Miss Van Helsing,’ she said, ‘We’ll take my hearse. When a Seer is raving, it’s best to do as they wish.’
‘Give me half a second to get Matilda, at least,’ Michaela said, not wanting to go into Baltimore without being armed to the teeth.
‘I doubt we shall need such violence,’ Lady Sitrinne said, ‘but if you like. Come here, boy,’ she said, and Mike tried to hand Aix off to her as gently as possible; the kid’s body was fragile enough that a Seer’s muscle tension could easily snap joints out of socket.
‘Aix, mon cher…’ Lady Sitrinne said, and Mike didn’t catch the rest other than it being soothing and French, as she ran outside and opened up the bottom compartment of the bus, that had her spare bug-out bag—and Matilda.
Matilda was a crossbow, one passed down from father to son—and then, for the first time, father to daughter. She’d reinforced it with steel, but the upgrades for a crossbow were mostly to the replaceable parts, like strings and bolts and limbs, not the stock. The wood was mahogany, and she was as long as a rifle, so she was heavy—but she bolted vampires down better than bullets ever could, and could be used to beat the shit out of them at close range, vampires only being susceptible to wooden weapons as they were.
Sitrinne pulled up beside her, and Michaela tossed her duffel of chainmaille and side-arms in the open back door, then slid in across the leather, careful of Matilda.
‘What’s he saying?’ Michaela asked, as she started to pull her maille shirt on over her prodigous chest and shoulders.
‘René’s master is attempting a Summoning.’
‘Well that’s concerningly unlike him—’
‘He has got hold of a Necronomicon,’ was accompanied by accelerating. ‘We must get to Baltimore.’
‘Even goin’ a dollar and hittin’ every green light’ll still take us two hours’n change,’ Michaela said, calm now that she knew what was happening. ‘Slow down so we don’t crash, and I’ll find us the Tom Tunnel.’
⁂
‘Whatever you do, don’t let that guy free you!’ Aix yelled into the Dreamscape, swimming through dark clouds, ‘You hear me? Buddy! Come back!’ He started to get scared as the chanting got louder, echoing, turning into noise that mixed in with the worst memories of the infrasound that had plagued his last two living places, oscillating in his bones and driving him mad… ‘Cthulhu!’ he finally said, using the name he attached to the being’s appearance. ‘Cthulhu! CthulhuCthulhuCthulhu!!!’ When it didn’t work, he tried latching onto higher powers. ‘Morpheus! Morpheus! Morpheus, help!!!’
He landed in a sea made of crayon, and it was quiet except for splishing and splashing noises that weren’t realistic so much as… animated. Little fish made of crayon-circles and squiggles, of the species preschoolers learned to draw, swam up to him, until he finally landed on the bottom, which was a wavy line of yellow with one pink sea-star and one red crab and one scallop shell of pale blue.
Where was he? ‘Hello?’ he said, and hugged his tail. ‘Is anyone there?’ he tried again. ‘Morpheus?’
‘Hello fren!’
He turned, and saw a familiar pair of big black eyes in a little white face. ‘…Pippin?’
‘You say help help why you scare?’
‘There’s a bad man, he’s hurting people with magic. He’s gonna kill René. We gotta stop that from happening.’
‘I call Big Mommy! No worry bees, Big Mommy help! Big Mommy no scare of no things! Big Mommy come eat Bad Man all up!’ She patted him with one little inky hand and disappeared.
Aix turned to look at the little red crab, sighing. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any stories about Jocosa eatin people, but then again I’ve never heard a clown speak in several full sentences before, either, so let’s you and me both hope it’s Crab Rave Time for that fucker and his Ominous Chanting, huh?’
The little red crab clicked its claws.
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say.’
⁂
They’d just crossed into the tunnel when Pippin suddenly started awake and started bawling. Michaela, who hadn’t even known Pippin was aboard, startled. Sitrinne Averay, right next to this cacophonious noise, did not.
‘There, there,’ she said softly, ‘what is it, pet? Tell Auntie.’
‘Big Mommy stuck!’ Pippin said, in a shockingly clear voice—then again, when a clown spoke, it was always shocking, because for the thousands of years they had been at humanity’s side, they only spoke in the direst emergencies.
⁂
Victoria woke up because her phone was going off; the scent of her old room alerted her where she was, and she groped around for her glasses, putting them on and squinting at the glowing hands and numbers of the large-faced clock that lived on her mahogany bedside drawer. Witching hour. That was worrying. She pulled the bell, and one of the staff immediately came in, likely they’d heard the phone and were just waiting for a summons. They—Victoria couldn’t tell in the dark, her night-vision had gone in her thirties—picked up the phone, and them determining who was calling and what about gave Victoria time to get out of bed, slip on her slippers, and get into the marabou-trimmed chiffon peignoir hanging on the hook on one of her bed-posts. When she got the few steps over to the gossip-bench, she settled down on the comfortable violet cushion and the staff member waited, handing her the phone’s receiver after discreetly wiping it off with an alcohol wipe—a habit the household had gotten into years before the Covid pandemic.
‘Miss Van Helsing, ma’am,’ revealed it was Vincent Coffin, one of the many Coffins that worked for her family, and had for generations. ‘She says she needs you in a professional capacity, for an emergency in Baltimore.’
Victoria, like everyone, knew what a dangerous mess Baltimore was; the adrenaline woke her up the rest of the way, as she took the receiver, covering it with her hand. ‘Coffee, and a light meal, thank you, Coffin,’ she said, and put the phone up to her ear. ‘What do you need?’
‘I need you to see if you can find anyone in Baltimore that knows what the hell is going on. Aix is unconscious and was babbling in French about René needing help, and his little clown just started bawling about Big Mommy being stuck. She’s real upset, we can’t get anything else out of her. Lady Sitrinne says Big Man is attempting a Summoning, got his hands on a Necronomicon; and she and I are doing a cannonball run down there right now—we’re in Tom Tunnel.’
Victoria pressed down her urge to sigh heavily; like most mediums, she avoided Baltimore’s dead—the Hunter of Baltimore was a necromancer of great power and low morals named Anna Heeren, and she treated everyone who didn’t go through her as suspicious. The problem was, she worked with the police—anathema for any Hunter, the Mummery’s unspoken rule was you never worked with the authorities sincerely—you befuddled them, grifted them, acted like one to be an obstacle to them finding anything out.
The other danger was more insidious—Baltimore’s Prince was an old Dutch pirate, and his Bestiensklave was The Bear. Given there were no vampires that could thrall a larger and more powerful animal in the western hemisphere, one trod… carefully… around him.
‘Do you think this might be an opportunity?’ Victoria asked Michaela, carefully.
‘I don’t know. We have new people, with new elements. We have the Averay Matriarch hauling ass down there. That’s never happened before.’
There was the sound of a voice, but the phone on Michaela’s end didn’t pick it up. ‘Your granddame says “and it’s high time it did”.’
‘And Hell follows with her,’ Victoria said.
‘Yeah, and Hell says she wants you to rouse the troops if you can, and not to worry about the Heeren.’
‘Very well,’ Victoria said. ‘I shall rouse Cousin Squidge and the family ghosts first.’
There was a sound of Michaela turning on Speakerphone. ‘Say again, Lady Sitrinne,’ Michaela said.
‘I’ve taken the artefacts, so you ought to release the poltergeists.’
‘Are you… are you sure, Grand-mere?’ Victoria was a little startled—the family ghosts were one thing—the family poltergeists were quite a different, more dangerous colour of horse….
‘Diedrichs has the Necronomicon, Victoria Clarimonde.’
‘Yes, Grand-mere,’ was all you could say when Grand-mere got that tone in her voice. ‘What about the Heeren?’
‘She will not interfere. Our Stolas will make sure of that.’
When Grand-mere actually spoke the Name of their grand ancestor like that, Victoria knew things were both serious and, in the manner of Averays, Handled.