"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..."
Then there was nothing but the screaming.
99
"Session terminated. Goodbye."
"How'd you get in here? Stay back! The–"
"You can stop there and log out," I said to McGuire. "The rest is… just screaming." I tried to keep what I was feeling out of my voice, and off my face. I'm a cop – we're supposed to be good at that.
I may not have succeeded completely, because McGuire looked at me closely before he disconnected from my voicemail. I'd told him about Prescott's messages, so he'd asked me to retrieve them again but from his phone, to play over the speaker.
I glanced over at Karl, who was in McGuire's other visitor's chair. He looked like a guy with a bad stomachache – but whether that was from Prescott's discovery or from his screams, I didn't know.
McGuire was staring at the phone as if it were his worst enemy. He didn't look away from it as he said, "Super-vampire, huh?"
"It sounds kind of stupid when you call it that," I said. "But, still..."
"Yeah," McGuire said. "But, still..."
"And first night of the full moon," Karl said.
I hadn't had to look it up – none of us had. Everybody in the Supe Squad always knows when the full moon is due.
"Tonight," I said.
A good piece of the squad room's west wall is taken up with a map of the city and surrounding area. McGuire, Karl, and I stood looking at it, and what we saw did not make us happy.
All those lakes.
"Fuck," Karl said.
All those ponds.
"Fuck," McGuire said.
All those swimming pools.
"Motherfuck," I said.
"There's no way we're going to get surveillance of all those bodies of water," McGuire said. "We couldn't do it even if we knew what to look for, which we don't – or even if we had the entire U.S. Air Force at our disposal, which we sure as shit don't."
"So we can't find him by air," I said. "That's a fact. We'll have to approach it some other way."
"If you've got any ideas, you'll find me an eager audience," McGuire said.
I just shook my head, but Karl said, "There is one thing."