I tell Chad to start over at Kyle's house. I want to make sure he is well. Furthermore, I may not like the man, but I would not necessarily say he would deserve to be blown up. That is senseless, and an overkill. Then take a ride past Celeste. She is on her own most of the time, and it may be months before anyone even knew she was gone. Then we head over to the docks and make sure the loft is still standing. That is a long shot. Very few people are even aware that my loft even exists.
All is fine so far, so we find our way over to the far north side. I was really dreading this. Dark elves are dirty, spiteful little shits that live underground. I could never understand why someone would willingly choose to live underground. I am meant to sleep underground, and I do whatever I need to avoid doing that.
At the edge of the city to the north, there is a four-block radius that is a protected forest. Somewhere near the center of this forest there is an ancient oak, a monumental hulk of bark and scarred wood that has stood guard for nearly two millennia. The tree is older than I am.
There is a dead knot about six feet up the tree. Inside that knot there is a large brown button, normally covered with a thick, damp crust of pine needles, insect husks, and desiccated graveyard debris. I push that button; it acts like a doorbell. Once the button has been pushed,we sit and wait for a dark, sickly figure to ripple out of the black soil. He is a sight of clammy, pale blue skin and eyes like dull obsidian, clearly disgusted by the surface air and the green things above. We know he will snatch for our throats if we do not immediately offer up payment that surpasses the value of our own lives. Here he comes now…
The elf says, "You must not put high value on your life, ringing my bell, forcing me up here like some surface leech."
I reply, "Quite the opposite. I put high value on people I know. Furthermore, I have some questions for Osavaia. You are going to take me to him."
The elf has a ripper chain poorly tucked away, peeking at me from behind him. The elf opens his mouth, which appears to be moist with some green ooze. The slime is thick and iridescent, smelling vaguely of stagnant swamp water and fresh-turned earth. "Very well, how much have you to give for the pleasure of his company? You must be very wealthy indeed."
Without shifting myself, I reply, "I do have something very valuable. The lives of you, him, and whoever else you have in that pit you call a home down there. If you do as I ask, you will be allowed to live past the sun rise."
The dark elf begins to laugh as if I had made some kind of joke. "I guess your skull will be payment enough for bothering me tonight."
The elf pulls out a Blacksteel blade, with the speed of an incel. He telegraphs as though he were performing for some play, or someone he was attempting to impress.
With my quickness, I sidestep his assault, grab his head from behind, and put a blade of my own to his neck, just breaking the skin enough for a single, bead-like line of scarlet to bloom against the pale blue throat. He drops his blade faster than he can move as any real courage that he had drained from him.
With self-pity in his voice, he tries to bargain with me, "Please don't hurt me. I am just trying to feed my family. I only took this doorman job to make some money on the side…"
"SHUT... UP," I say to him. "You know why we are here. Get moving before I finish the shave I started on you and let this beautiful park drink what blood is left in your body."
I loosen my grip on his body and remove the ripper chain he has hidden. "What else do you have on you?"
"Not a thing, sir," he insists.
Chad finds a couple small weapons on his person and tosses them all aside. I push the handle of my blade into his shoulder and motion to the pit he rose out of. "I will head down first. Chad, you send 'Dalton' here down after, and you follow behind." I throw the saw blade that I had gotten off of the elf down the pit first to make sure there are no traps set as I will be the first to climb down the ladder.
After we make our way to the bottom, I allow our new friend to lead the way to the leader of the Dark Elves. We walk down a narrow corridor that is barely five feet high, forcing us to stoop.
The end opens up to a gigantic room—a startling, garish spectacle. The sheer scope of the cavern swallows the dim light, its ceiling lost above the colossal, rough-hewn pillars of metal and stone. It looks as if Fremont Street in Vegas had been ripped from the surface and dropped into the deep earth, yet lacking any grace.
The very air is choked with the metallic tang of deep earth and the stale, heated breath of hundreds of hidden lives. This place glows with a thousand cheap, vulgar electric lights, a mocking sun for creatures of the dark. Heavy wooden braces, reinforced with a grey, crude cement, hold the walls together like visible, straining tendons, struggling to contain the weight of the forest above.
All the buildings shimmer and are lit up like a carnival, trying desperately to lure in a populace that exists only in darkness. We make our way down a walk paved with rough brick and mortar. The bricks look as if metal flakes were mixed into the stone, maybe even precious stones, to highlight the buildings they surround.
When we get a few doors down, we shoulder our way through a set of crude swinging doors and into a bar. The place is a low-ceilinged, smoky dive, constructed from salvaged, unpolished wood that smells of stale fungal ale and cheap disinfectant. It looks like something stripped straight out of a dusty old west mining camp. At least a dozen dirty elves—their skin ranging in tones of sickly blue, purple, and black—are scattered about drinking and commiserating.
One elf sits off to the left of the room at a round table, looking as if he were playing poker with three other elves. I toss the doorman off to the right and make my way to an open seat at the table. Chad stands behind me, just to my right.
"You have been a busy little till-jockey, I see." The elf tilts his head a little in an attempt to keep up with what I am telling him. "There was quite the show up top tonight. You are the only people around that can move enough blasting gear and not draw attention to where it was from. I want to know who you sold it to, and I want to know what was their intended target?"
The elf grins as if he has the upper hand. "I have no problem giving you that info. I can even give you the same deal I gave to them. All you have to do is show me what you think it's worth, and we can get down to business."
I fire back at him, "Like I told your youngster you have popping up like the gopher in Caddyshack, I can offer you the most valuable thing around." The elf gets a huge, greedy grin on his face. "I can offer you the sunrise tomorrow. And the sunrise the day after that. All I need are the answers to those two little questions."
Frustration crosses the face of every elf within earshot. "How are you going to offer me something that is already mine?" Osavaia looks to the men at the table and says, "Will you please kill these slugs so I can get back to my game?"
I stand up with my quickness, moving so fast I look like a shadow. I pass the bar to our right, the movement a mere blur. I open the carotid and femoral arteries on four of the men standing there with drinks. The speed is inhuman; the cuts are precise and silent.
Before a single drop of blood hits the floor, I return to my seat and tell him, "I can open the rest of your men up as well. I would rather just take the information and go home."
"Fuck me, they're vampires!" Osavaia cries out.
"Now you are getting it," I say.
"Alright, no more!" He pleads. "I was approached by some old woman. She seemed to have money to burn and wanted as many explosives as we could give her. The old lady said it was to take out a vamp club. She did not say exactly, just vamp club."
Everything falls into place. I stand to leave and tell him, "If there is one hole in this story, I will be back with my friends to finish what I started at the bar." I lower my chin and point at him.
As we made our way out of that nasty pit, I understood that the glam vamps stick out far more than we do. With no real understanding of the hierarchy or the vampire world, someone could easily mistake Genders for a central headquarters for all of us. I had Chad swing us by Genders so I could see the damage. When we pulled up, the scene was a grotesque spectacle. Dozens of people—gawkers and news crews—lined the police tape surrounding the rubble that was once the heartbeat of the glam vamps. Using our minds, we made the line of police let us in. Getting people to do something we want like that is easy; digging information people do not want to give up is much more difficult.
We made our way to the back of the club—or what was once the back—and found Joe-ell injured, but not as bad as it could have been. "What can you tell me about what happened?" I ask him.
With sadness and frustration, he says, "You're so sweet to be concerned, Rexey. It made no sense. We were all at the back, like we are most nights."
I try to use humor to help him focus, saying, "Relaxing, kicking back with your sunglasses on?"
He goes on, "That's right, gorgeous. And then five or six people that looked like they were all beat to hell walked in. They were moving real slow, and I could smell them—that unmistakable stench of necrotic flesh and stale decay—as soon as they hit the door. I have no idea how they got past our doorman, but about halfway inside, they all just blew up. Not in the good way."
"They blew up? You mean they had grenades or something?"
He corrects me, "No, they blew up like from the middle. Like from bad Mexican food or something."
"Right," I reply, as the mechanism began to violently snap into place for me. "Thank you. I will get to the bottom of this, Joe-ell. We will figure this out."
He comes back with, "I always knew there was some kind of spark between us, honey. We gotta test these waters after this all gets figured out."
"Take the men you have left and get to your coffins. MAKE SURE YOU GUYS ARE SECURE this time." I felt like he did not hear me last time. This could have been avoided.
Chad and I head to what was once the front of the club and walk down the pulverized street, stepping over broken glass and chunks of pulverized concrete. The scene is a logistical nightmare; civilian vehicles, news vans, and abandoned police cruisers are jammed in a solid, shining gridlock. Once we get near our car, there are those five kids again screwing around with it, in nearly the same pose as last time. I get ready to deal another helping of whoop-ass on them, but this time, they see us coming, and they all take off long before we arrive at the car. We climb in and Chad was able to navigate us out of that circus that had formed.
I tell Chad to head over to the loft. I want to check on Sera and make sure nothing is off about the area. Once we get to the loft, I tell Chad to wait, and I will be back down soon. Keep the car running.
I make my way upstairs and Sera was watching the news, commenting on how much damage had been done. "I was just there," I tell her. "I am not yet sure who set this in motion, but it was clearly suicide bombers—zombies—that were the trigger men. At least from the accounts I got at ground zero."
"Zombies?" she says. "I have not seen a real zombie since I was a kid."
Strange thing to see for anyone, I thought. I remembered I had told her that we could get her stuff. I thought, since I had not yet sent someone, I could take her now to get essentials and I could send guys later to get anything else she may need.
We head down to the car. I tell Chad that we are going to get her things and he should send some drones to Kyle's place later to get anything else she wants. We pull out. About three or four blocks from the loft I get a serious wave of retrocognition. I tell Chad to stop the car so we can get out, but it is far too late.
Faster than even I can move, brilliant orange flame engulfed the car, tearing it from the asphalt and sending it four or five feet into the air. The explosion was not just sound—it was a hammer blow to my chest, a spike of pure kinetic energy. I did my best to protect Sera. Fragments from the engine block ripped through the dashboard like razor-sharp shrapnel, tearing the cloth from our bodies and scoring the metal around us.
The kinetic force hammered us into the chassis, and Chad and I spilled out of the burning wreckage, slightly injured.
I forced myself up, shaking off the lingering concussion of the blast. The sound of burning crackled in my ears, I reached back in to pull Sera out, knowing that it would not be a pretty sight. As I lay her body on the pavement, a loud, piercing scream cut through the ringing silence.
It was the old lady from the cemetery with that stone around her neck. She screams as if she was in a horror movie. She runs up to me and says, "This is all because of you! You are the reason all of this is happening! If you would have just kept your evil, dirty hands off of my daughter, this never would have happened!"
I just stare at her, stunned. My mind was seized, unable to form words to convey the shock and the violent disorientation my body was experiencing. There is no way this could be happening. The old woman made her way to a car full of witches that was parked waiting for her. Clearly they were the cause of all of this—all the recent carnage and destruction. It had all come about from the actions and events they had set in motion. I could not understand what could motivate someone to make such wildly reckless choices. One thing I do know: my family is in direct danger, and to keep anything from happening, I will need to create a carnage of my own.