"It could've made the difference, Stan! It could. If the protection was stronger, the fucking curse might not have been able to get him. Instead, he went out as hard as any motherfucker I ever saw, or even heard of. The dude was trying to help us, and for that he had his fucking eyes gouged out, and got his arms and legs chopped off, and then he was burned alive…"
Karl buried his face in his hands and started to cry.
If I wasn't driving, I just might have joined him.
• • • •
Back at the squad, we reported to McGuire what we'd seen, what we knew, and what we suspected.
He sat back and ran a hand slowly over his big jaw. "All right," he said. "I'll assign a couple of other detectives to it, just so we can say we investigated and filed a report. I'll need you to brief them before they go out, so that they don't waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel."
Fine. Now I'd have to explain to a couple of other cops just how bad I had fucked up. McGuire was right to do that – I just wasn't looking forward to it.
"You figure this was Sligo, shutting Prescott's mouth?" McGuire asked. "He's got a copy of the Opus Mago. He'd probably know about the curse, and how to make a murder look like one."
I thought about that, then shook my head. "No, if it was him, he'd want us to know it – he wouldn't try to hide his work by imitating the curse, the arrogant prick."
"Besides," Karl said, "it happened in broad daylight. Sligo's a vamp, remember?"
"Yeah, you got a point there." McGuire looked closely at me, then gave the same scrutiny to Karl. "You guys need some time off?" he asked quietly.
Considering everything that was going on right now, he was being extremely generous. But there was no way I wanted to spend the next few days sitting around my house thinking – or worse, drinking myself stupid.
I looked at Karl, who gave me a small headshake. His face had lost a little of the stricken look it had worn at the hospital, but only a little.
"We'd just as soon keep busy, boss, but thanks," I said.
McGuire took a case file from a stack sitting on his desk and put it on his blotter. Opening it, he said, "Then get back to work and catch this motherfucker, before he kills anybody else." e susiv›
I'd told Karl I wanted to check my voicemail, and why. He said he'd start going through the files, to see if he could find a connection between Sligo and Jamieson Longworth. Then he reminded me that sunset was about an hour away. "You've got an appointment, in the parking lot," he said.
"Yeah," I said, "if she shows up."
"She seemed pretty definite about it this morning. Think she'd change her mind?"
"No, I'm just hoping that Longworth's threat turns out to be empty bullshit, that's all."
"Yeah, I know," he said. "Don't forget, I'm going down with you when it's time. Help you wait."
I nodded my thanks. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
"To access your voicemail messages, please press 8." The computer's recorded voice was as polite as ever. I touched 8.
"Please enter your four-digit extension number."
4294
"Please enter your security code."
3475833
"You have eight new messages. These are your options while listening. To listen to a message, press 5. To go back to the beginning of a message, press 7. To delete a message, press 2 twice. To save a message, press 4. To advance to the next message, press 3. To end this session, press 9 twice. Ready."
5
"Going to the first new message."
"Sergeant, this is Sonia, over in Human Resources. Your leave record for last month hasn't been-"
22
3
"Stanley, this is Father Cebula at St Casimir's. We've got the annual Corpus Christi banquet coming up-"
22
3
"Hey, Stan – Lacey. What do you get when you cross a female ogre with a werewolf? You-"
4
3
"Mr Markowski, this is Rob at Nationwide Insurance. I see you've got a birthday coming up soon, and I'd like to talk-"
22
3
"Sergeant, this is Ben Prescott, calling from my lovely new digs – let's see, it's room 333. The material I asked my assistant at G-town to send me arrived via FedEx early this morning, including the remaining fragments of the Opus Mago that I had yet to translate. I went right to work, and I'm pleased to say that it went faster than I'd anticipated. Maybe my brain is a little sharper from its long rest while I was comatose.
"I should probably wait until you get over here to fill you in on what I've been able to make of this, but I'm pretty excited – and more than a little disturbed, frankly. Anyway, I thought I would get the gist of it to you now, in case that curse we talked about earlier turns out to be real, ha ha.
"Most of what I've learned about this spell you're interested in deals with the final stage. By the way, the fifth sacrifice, the final vampire killing, is supposed to take place as part of the actual ritual. The other four are prologues, as it were.
"All right, let's see here. The book specifies that the spell must take place near water. Still water, that is not of the sea. Meaning, not salt water. The other requirement is that the ritual be carried out on the first night of the full moon, at the 'turn of time' – which, given the context, I would say refers to midnight.
"Um, that's followed by a long incantation the practitioner is supposed to recite, that's probably of little interest to you… Okay, here's something: I expect you'll want to know what all of this is in aid of – the purpose ofthe spell, as it were. Well, that would be, in a word: transformation. If the ritual, which is supposed to be one of extreme difficulty, by the way, is carried out in the proper manner, all the magical I's dotted and T's crossed, and so on, the vampire/wizard conducting-"
"The disk space allotted for this message has been filled. To listen to the next message, press 3."
Goddamn motherfucking cocksucker shit!!
3!
"Advancing to the next new message."
"Prescott again, Sergeant. Sorry about that. Longwindedness is an occupational hazard of academe.
"All right, now, where was – oh, right. Transformation. According to this, the practitioner will be transformed into… this next word is a double compound, and the grammar is confusing, but I've rendered it as 'a creature of both night and day.' The fragment says the one casting the spell will 'walk under the sun without fear.' I suppose if you were a vampire, that would be a pretty desirable thing, wouldn't it?
"Oh, and it gets better – better, I mean from the perspective of the vampire. It says that, after the transformation, the practitioner will 'fear not holy things, nor fire, nor sharp branches.' Would that be wooden stakes, do you suppose? I guess that would make the guy some sort of 'super-vampire,' wouldn't it?
"That goes on for a while, then four lines further down it says that this one who 'walks under, or beneath, the sun without fear,' can drink the blood of others and thereby make them 'brothers, or brethren, like himself.'
"I'm not sure what to make of that one – you're probably a better judge than I, since you deal with this kind of thing all the time. I mean, everybody knows that vampires can reproduce by exchanging blood with one of their victims, presumably willing ones. Nothing new there. Or could it mean that once transformed, this 'super-vampire' can make others like himself, just by biting them? I suppose the blood exchange is assumed there, too.
"Quite the spell this guy's got here. No wonder it's supposed to be so hard. He turns himself into a vampire without vulnerabilities, then can pass that on to others in the usual vampiric way? Sounds like a bad James Bond movie, if that's not redundant, but with fangs. You could create a whole army of – Jesus Christ, what the fuck? Who are you? How'd you get in here? Stay back! The… the power of Christ compels you! Get away from me, get away get awayyyyy…"