Part 4 (2/2)
”Ow!” He sat on the floor holding his ankle and rocking back and forth in the yoga position known as the ”freaked-out half-lotus.” Then he noticed the gash he'd put in the bronze, directly over Jody's right clavicle.
”I'm sorry, Countess,” Jared said, still a little breathless from his battle. ”I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just that I had to save Lucifer 2. You'd do the same thing for Lord Flood if he was in the story.”
Jared buffed at the bronze with his sleeve, but the gash was deep and wasn't going to go away with polis.h.i.+ng. ”Abby's going to kill me. I'll patch you, Countess. Just hang on. Toothpaste. We used it on the wall that time we drank Abby's mom's vodka and played cross-country darts in her living room. Hang on a minute.”
Jared let the heavy dagger drop to the floor, climbed to his feet, winced, then limped off to the bathroom to look for toothpaste.
He located a tube of all natural tartar control with baking soda just as the sun dropped under the horizon in the west. Out in the living room, a needle-thin stream of mist began leaking out of the gash he'd made in the bronze statue. Toothpaste probably wouldn't have fixed it.
THE ANIMALS.
In the last two months, the Animals, the night stock crew at the Marina Safeway, had hunted an ancient vampire, blown up his yacht, stolen millions of dollars' worth of art, sold it for pennies on the dollar, spent the remaining hundreds of thousands on gambling and a blue hooker, got turned into vampires, were torn apart by zoo animals, then burned up by sunlamps when they attacked Abby Normal, then turned, by Foo, back into seven guys who stocked shelves at the Safeway and smoked a little too much weed. And as it often is with adventurers, after the adventure, they were feeling a little bored, and a little worried that nothing exciting would ever happen to them again.
After you've battled the darkness, then become the darkness, then s.h.a.gged the darkness, frozen turkey bowling and skiing behind the floor-scrubbing machine just doesn't hold the same thrill. After you've shared a blue prost.i.tute with your buddies to the tune of a half a million dollars, only to have her kill and resurrect you before disappearing into the night, swapping stories of banging babes was a bit of an anticlimax. After all, they worked nights and the oldest of them, Clint, was only twenty-three, so most of their stories were gross exaggerations, wishful thinking, or outright lies anyway. Even crucifying Clint with zip ties on the potato chip rack every other Friday didn't seem fun anymore, and last week they had just left him hanging, thras.h.i.+ng in the Doritos, and went off to stock their aisles before he could even forgive them for knowing not what they did. Tragic, really, to be young, free, and mind-numbingly bored.
So when the Emperor of San Francisco came screaming out of the parking lot and slammed, face-first, into the big Plexiglas front window, rattling the Tic Tacs on every register, each of them dropped what he was working on and headed to the front of the store, hoping in their hearts that something outstanding was coming down.
The seven, the Animals, stood on one side of the big window, while the Emperor pounded on the other, the royal hounds leaping and barking at his side.
”Maybe we should let him in,” said Clint, curly-haired, born-again, exheroin addict who worked cereal, coffee, and juices. ”He seems troubled.”
”Si,” said Gustavo, the porter, leaning on his mop. ”Troubled.”
”Seems f.u.c.king freaked,” said Drew, the Ichabod-Crane-gaunt master of the frozen food aisle and chief medical officer. ”Totally f.u.c.king freaked.”
”What's wrong?” asked Lash, the lean black guy who had become their leader when Tommy was turned into a vampire, largely because he almost had an MBA, but also because he was a black guy and inherently cooler than everyone else.
”Murder, destruction, ravenous creatures of the night, a storm of them,” shouted the Emperor. ”Hurry, please.”
”He always says that,” said Barry, the balding fireplug of a scuba diver who also stocked soap and dog food.
”Well, every time he says it, it's kind of true,” said Jeff, the tall blond expower forward with the blown-out knee (baking supplies and international foods). ”I say let him in.”
”Look, the retriever is all bandaged up. Poor guy,” said Troy Lee, their resident martial arts expert who worked the gla.s.s aisle. ”Let them in.”
”You just want to roll the little one up in a burrito,” said Lash.
”Yeah, that's right, Lash. Because I'm Chinese, I have a deep-seated need to nosh house pets. Now why don't you let him in before my inner Chinaman forces me to kung-fu your b.i.t.c.h a.s.s.”
Because he understood that he was the leader only so long as he told everyone to do what they wanted to do anyway, and because he had had his b.i.t.c.h a.s.s kung-fued in the past and hadn't cared for it, Lash unlocked the door and let the Emperor in.
The old man fell into the store when Lash opened the door. b.u.mmer and Lazarus stopped barking and bolted by them, and on toward the back of the store.
Jeff and Drew got the Emperor seated on one of the registers and Troy Lee handed him a bottle of water. ”Chill, Your Majesty, we've done this before.”
”Not like this. Not like this,” said the Emperor. ”It's a storm of evil. Lock the door.”
Lash rolled his eyes. They really had done this before, and the door being locked or unlocked wasn't going to make much difference if a vampire was following the old man.
”We got your back, Highness,” Lash said.
”Lock the door,” the Emperor moaned, pointing through the window. A fog bank was moving across the parking lot, with rather more intent than one usually expects from a fog bank. A high, yowling screech seemed to come out of the fog in a stream, as if it had been sampled, amplified, and duplicated a thousand times.
The Animals moved to the gla.s.s.
”Lock the door, Lash,” Clint said. Clint never gave orders.
The edge of the fog bank was boiling with shapes, claws, ears, eyes, teeth, tails-cats formed of fog, rolling in a wave over one another, some materializing partially, only to evaporate and roll back into the cloud, their red eyes moving through the cloud like embers out of a firestorm.
”Whoa,” said Drew.
”Whoa,” repeated the others.
”Okay, that is is different,” said Troy Lee. different,” said Troy Lee.
”My friends all over the City are missing,” the Emperor said. ”Street people. They're gone. Just their clothes and gray dust,” the Emperor said. ”The cats are killing everything in their way.”
”That is f.u.c.ked up,” said Jeff.
”Deeply, deeply f.u.c.ked up,” said Barry, dragging one of the heavy wooden order dividers off the register and brandis.h.i.+ng it like a club.
”Lock the f.u.c.king door, Las.h.!.+” Clint screamed.
”Jesus hates it when you use the f f-word,” said Gustavo, the Mexican porter, who was Catholic and liked to remind Clint when his Jesus was slipping.
The fog washed against the window and claw marks etched the Plexiglas instantly to frost, as if it had all been sanded. The noise was like, well, it was like a thousand vampire cats clawing on Plexiglas-it made their teeth hurt.
”Did anyone bring weapons?” Troy Lee asked.
”I brought some weed,” Drew said.
A cat's claw of fog crept under the door and raked the toe of Lash's sneaker. He snapped the lock shut, pulled out the key, and backed away.
”Okay, break time,” he said. ”Crew meeting in the walk-in.”
JARED.
Across town, in the bedroom of a fas.h.i.+onable loft, in the fas.h.i.+onable SOMA neighborhood, aspiring rat-s.h.a.gger, Jared Whitewolf, looked up from rubbing his sore ankle to see a completely naked redhead walk into the room. Her hair hung to her waist in a great curling cape, framing her figure, which was perfect and as white as a marble statue. She held Jared's double-edged dagger in her right hand.
Jared backed up onto the bed in a reverse crab walk. ”I, I, I, it, it, it-Abby made me-”
”Chill, Scissorhands,” Jody said. ”You'd better find some of those blood bags of Steve's fast, unless you'd like to finish high school as a pile of greasy dust. Countess is thirsty.”
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