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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