C. Gaither, Author: February 2021

Chapter One

“I hate kids shows about racism,” Peter Jennings said. He was my work partner here at Terrestrial Affairs, and currently sported the costume of Ichabod Crane. His vibrantly red hair—a little darker than Celtic ginger—was, for once, tied down into something approximating an early 1800’s hairstyle. He was Black and very dark skinned, so strangers often figured the ginger came out of a bottle. It didn’t. This assumption annoyed him almost as much as the tradition that a Black man with red hair is some kind of sorcerer. Mentioning that was a good way to get him to burst into flames. He was Ichabod because someone had once compared him to the literary coward, and he delt with insults by making them a game. He’d been balancing a Styrofoam pumpkin with artificial flames on his knee all night. He wasn’t in a very good mood.

I steered our government sedan down Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi, Texas, at two AM, heading towards Louisiana Avenue. This is the ritzy, slinky neighborhood in Corpus, a kind of low-rent River Oaks. Still a bit high-end for our normal clients. Movies want you to believe that being a witch, wizard, vampire or similar flavor thereof is a one-way ticket to wealth and celebrity, but the boogeyman works minimum wage same as the rest of us. It’s one reason Terrestrial Affairs exists. Predators target the vulnerable, and the magical are uniquely exposed. But some of our clients have the connections to afford wealth, and tonight we needed to check in on one of the wealthiest.

She was always a headache.

Normally Pete and I work day shift, but the November Child annual rabies push meant all hands on deck at night. The streets this late were mostly deserted. Corpus did have a club scene to attract night fauna. It just wasn’t a very big one. November Child Day is our chance to educate the public about Terrestrial Affairs, which our boss had read as “make sure they know we aren’t cops”, despite us having some credentials that might say otherwise. We were strongly encouraged go out tonight in costume as soon as the office Halloween party was over. Peter’s burning pumpkin was a hit every year. I had dressed in the rags and patches of Pippi Longstocking and went unrecognized. Our conversation about ignorance of the classics and the merits of kids movies had now brought us well past my safe comprehension zone.

But Pete was my friend. You take risks for friends.

“Alright, I’ll bite. Why do you hate kids shows about racism?” I said.

“Because they let you pretend you’ve done something. Using a metaphor like, I dunno, kitty cats vs. discount Shirley Temple. Racism and equality, and everything’s fixed with a song. Nice on paper. But you should be comparing apples to apples, and you're doing apples and felines. Saying you should treat both the same is great, but you’re also saying that Black apples are cats. We get that you see us as a different species. That doesn’t need any more reinforcement.”

I was white. Basically Wonderbread. I knew when we were having conversations above my paygrade. But I also knew when Pete was on his last nerve and that had been about six hours ago. This wasn’t for my benefit. “Or like that kid’s movie about a bunny rabbit saving predators? Which was sorta saying that the people discriminated against are the predators?” I said.

“Oh, you caught that one?” He said, then nodded. “Yeah. That.”

I flipped on my blinker to change lanes again. I’ll admit, I was more than a little worried. Pete had immediately shut off the jazz tape he’d been playing earlier. He’d been going through a classics phase the last couple weeks. Louie Armstrong. Ella Fitzgerald. Little bit of BB King. At home he went straight for Usher, Beyonce and the Weekend, but he did have to behave himself in an Agency car. Music was a part of Happy Pete, and Happy Pete hadn’t come to work today. We both knew why, and we both weren’t talking about it.

Terrestrial Affairs has jurisdiction over supernatural residents of this plane of existence. We take on supernatural events that involve extradimensional entities and provide specialized investigation services for mundane law enforcement. That’s the government copy, anyway. In reality? We soothe ghosts and network them to the good exorcists. Same with the legitimately possessed. Werewolves and vampires have their rabies shots updated, and we try to keep the freshly changed away from the gangs and nastier packs. We combat child-targeted Fae propaganda like Tinkerbell, and make sure the Halloween novelty witch kits can’t summon anything bigger than the nearest consenting poltergeist. You’ve got the right to be a witch, a vampire or a were-wolf, but your neighbors also have the right to be safe. Balancing that friction is the heart of what we do.

The workload is hell. Being able to call myself “Agent Astrid Stone” on a business card feels spiffy, but most of the job was just connecting Client A with Resource B, and then doing the paperwork, which is evidence of demonic influence all by itself. Poltergeist activity got a lot less scary once I understood the ghost just needed cognitive behavioral therapy, but I’m still terrified of the checkboxes on that specific billing sheet.

But there are some things that are unique to the job.

November Child Day is always the first Tuesday in the titular month. It memorializes the death of the unidentified Patient Zero in the rabies outbreak of 1967. That outbreak, and the political fallout that followed, motivated the government mandate that eventually became Terrestrial Affairs. On that day, educational materials are presented, children escape school, and we go door to door to our at-risk clients and make sure their rabies paperwork is in order.

And as most of those clients are vampires…night shift. My dashboard clock read 2:05 am, and the streetlights raced us by.

“That movie about aliens in South Africa was pretty decent,” I said.

Peter rubbed his temple. “They were portraying apartheid with literal aliens. That’s as other-species as you can get. And the ones that really grind my gears are the ones that use vampirism as a metaphor. Like that HBO show with the pretty blond chick. Vampires suffer from discrimination! And hey, here’s a good idea. Let’s showcase that in the south.” He shook his head, laughing silently to himself.

“Not to be the devil’s advocate, but that’s kind of true,” I said. Sure, they got grandfathered into the Rights of Magical Persons Act, but it wasn’t a felony to kill one without a warrant until the late 80s. Besides, it was more than a little dehumanizing to get the same shots as the family dog if you wanted to avoid life-shattering fines.

Peter gave me one of his patented, blister-chrome-off-a-trailer-hitch looks. “Astrid. What’s the demographic on American vampires again? The ones over fifty? The kind they make movies about?”

Right.

Vampires skew white. Really white. If I am Wonderbread, they’re dissolved in bleach. There are arguments about random selection and chance, but that’s just window dressing. Vampires skew white because the vampire Masters—the older, magical powerhouses who typically lead gangs—are mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who only ever turn other WASPs, and the Masters are typically the best at keeping their fledglings alive. The majority of over-fifties in the south that weren’t their Master’s pets survived under the bedsheets of a certain group with a fondness for, let’s say, konsonants with a triple k.

That part doesn’t make it into the movies much.

When Terrestrial Affairs was formed via the Rights for Magical Persons Act, thus giving future me a job, the undead from other races began living long enough to see a couple anniversaries and maybe sire their own fledglings. But new vampires don't typically last long. The average lifespan for a vampire is six months from date of turning. And that average includes the multi-century old survivors like Dracula. The kids in the Fluffy Intern Pool come fresh out of college with visions of stakes, garlic, and holy water, and leave once they realize it’s more numbers for the blood banks and late nights with a dust buster so the surviving family have something to bury. All agents of Terrestrial Affairs know a dead vampire. It’s a good week if you aren’t flushing ash off your work shoes. But under the RMPA, vampires do have a right to exist. And even if a vampire’s specific attitude chafed at you, you had to learn how to deal.

But tonight, Peter was raw. Even more-so than usual.

There was a small chance this was romantic tension. Peter was gay and had the same sort of romantic history I did: Assholes. Lots of them. This was his usual attitude when he was in the discard phase of the latest narcissistic pretty boy he’d brought home. But usually he’d have something of a honeymoon phase first. Glee and hope with rose-tinted glasses uninhibited by experience or reality.

No. The client was the problem.

“At least nobody mistook you for the queen of childhood overcompensation,” I said, as we parked on Louisiana. I liked Pippi Longstocking. Everyone had called me Pollyanna.

“It’s because you’re white and optimistic and that movie was on the Hallmark channel last night,” Peter said, glowering, as we got out of the car.

“I had red yarn braids held up by wire,” I said. I’d ditched the wig in the trunk as we secured laptops. Our car trunks are spell-proofed by a couple different occult methods, as per federal regulations. It also stored our Moon Silver jewelry, which we were already wearing. Dark Fae, vampires and Inducted members of Deep Cults are all allergic to the stuff. When your job description includes servicing all but the latter, it’s a pretty good idea to make it a regular fashion choice. I held my hands out to indicate the size of my braids. “I don’t see where the confusion is.”

“You’re lucky they’re not calling you Raggedy Ann,” Peter said, then glared up at the current client’s house. “Fine. Let’s get Camille over with.”

Older vampires understand that a good image and better patrons are a must for survival. Camille Ward had spent her decades cultivating the cotillion and debutante crowd. She presented as one part Scarlett O’Hara, two parts Steel Magnolias, a shining survivor of the Antebellum South and a homing missile aimed right at the country clubs set, where Southern Nostalgia is its own genre. Of course, this might have suffered somewhat if they knew her history. Some centenarian vamps survive without resorting to wanton murder orgies. Camille hadn’t been one of them.

And she was part of what had Pete wound up so tight.

Camille had moved to Texas when Hurricane Katrina decimated her historic former plantation and had moved from Houston to Corpus because Houston’s Master Vampire despised her. She was already here when Peter and I began working together six years ago. Each November, we trotted up to her door and endured the theatrical sighs and occasional angry rant about how she was not a, pardon her language, damn dog, she didn’t need a (pardon her language) damn dog tag, and bless her heart (flutter of wrist and eyelids, extra honey on that pure Georgia Peach accent) if this wasn’t more than she’d stand. Cue fanning motion as if it were possible for her to feel hot. This was always followed by an attempt to get Peter to come inside and eat something. Vampires can’t eat, by the way. Anything edible would have been catered for our benefit. Each year we left, feeling dirty. And each year Peter took a detour to the magnolia tree growing at the corner of Camille’s spacious home and shit into her begonia bed.

I told him it was stupid and he would be fired when caught the first couple times he did it. That was when he told me Camille had refused to work with any other agent. Camille was going to be his client, or Camille wasn’t going to be anybody’s client. And our Director, who had all the bedside manner of dry ice, had told him to suck it up.

We walked up to her door, and Peter was already eyeing that tree. “Huh. She replanted. It’s a zinnia bed now.”

“Pokier leaves,” I said. Then, “You know, I could do this alone. You can go run through Sanctuary way out Weber.” The halfway house on the south side of town was for newbie vamps; there were always five or six fledglings in residence at Sanctuary House. Some of them even lived long enough to graduate.

But Camille wanted Peter.

“No, thanks,” He said. “It’s not your job to shield me from things, Stone. Especially not when I dig the holes myself.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Camille’s house was a replica of a French Quarter apartment block. Red brick, wrought iron painted green on the upper floor balconies. It stood out, even on this street. This was not Camille’s creation. It predated her arrival by a couple decades. Almost as if it were meant to be…or so she said every time we interviewed her.

I knocked on her door.

Or at least, I tried to.

I had expected the resistance of closure, but it opened at my touch. I stumbled a bit, my feet tangling in a spread of fabric draped carelessly in the foyer. The hallway within was illuminated by a set of crystal-and-brass imitation gas lamps. Not bright, but they did glimmer in the pile of crumpled silk and crinolines sitting on the marble tile, topped by a wagon-wheel hat profuse with feathers. The scent of gunsmoke almost overpowered the traces of decay. But I couldn’t mistake that smell. Not when the ash swirling out of Camille’s clothes left those neat, white stains where it touched my shoes.

All agents of Terrestrial Affairs know a dead vampire.

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