Half of a Ping-Pong table was shoved against a wall. Ted’s old paddle and a single yellowed ball rested on the corner. He had painted a net on the wall, giving him a practice table where he could play against himself. A minifridge hummed beneath the table. An orange extension cord trailed up through a heavily caulked hole in the ceiling.
I checked the fridge and pulled out one of eight identical blue thermoses, each one dated like the venison from upstairs. I unscrewed the lid and took a whiff.
“Blood?” Lena guessed.
“Probably deer blood.” I stepped toward the coffin and pulled the detonator from my pocket. “Go ahead.”
Lena tucked one bokken through her belt, readied the other, and yanked open the lid. The black barrel of a sawed-off shotgun poked out. From inside the coffin, Ted shouted, “Who the hell are-?”
Lena slammed the lid back down on the barrel, pinning it long enough for her to grab the end. Ted swore as he struggled to control his gun. I crouched low, trying to stay out of the line of fire.
Lena’s lips tightened in a smile. She adjusted her stance and thrust the gun backward, ramming the stock into Ted’s body. Ted’s cursing grew in pitch and intensity as Lena twisted the shotgun free and set it on the Ping-Pong table.
“Since when do you sleep armed, Ted?” I asked.
“Isaac?” The lid opened, and his words turned wary. “What brings you out this way?”
“Three vampires tried to kill me at work yesterday. A Wallacea showed up at my house early this morning to finish the job.”
“A what?”
“Bug-eater.”
“Yet here you are.” He snorted and sat up, pushing the lid back. A rubber pad glued to the wall protected the coffin’s edge. “Maybe the next one will have better luck.”
Ted was a small, slender man with wild eyes, wilder hair, and a complexion that would have made Snow White jealous. He was wearing nothing but ratty gray sweatpants, revealing a lean, bony torso. A vivid red mark on his right shoulder showed where Lena had rammed the gun into him.
I tossed him a thermos. He unscrewed the lid and took a long drink. Bloodshot eyes flitted from me to Lena and back. I could see the tension in the corded muscles of his neck and shoulders. The longer we waited in silence, the more nervous he’d get.
He smelled like death and Old Spice, the latter being the best thing he had found to overpower the former. When he spoke, his lips peeled back to reveal pale, receded gums and gaps among his ivory teeth where his fangs had once been. “Who’s the fat chick?”
“Oh, good, Ted. Insult the woman who just took your gun away.” I raised the detonator, earning a low snarl. “Her name’s Lena Greenwood. She’s the one who’s going to humiliate you-again-if you give us any crap.”
“Yah, I know that name. Tree lover, right?” He pointed to the trapdoor. “Would one of you bring Jimmer down here before the damn fool jumps and breaks his neck?”
The beagle looked ready to do just that. I could hear his claws scraping the edge of the hole as he peered down at us, his entire body quivering. He whined piteously as I approached. The instant I held out my arms, he launched himself into the air. I nearly dropped the detonator, but managed to catch both it and the dog. I set him down, and he raced toward the coffin.
Ted dipped a finger into the thermos and offered the red-coated digit to the dog, who reared up and began lapping at the blood.
“If you’ve made yourself a vampire beagle-” I began.
“Nah, Jimmer just likes the taste.” He set the thermos in the corner of the coffin and stretched. Without looking, he grabbed a plastic lighter and a half-empty pack of cigarettes from a pocket in the coffin’s blue satin lining. “So what will it take to get rid of you so I can go back to sleep?”
“A clean blood test, for starters.” While he lit up, I opened the small pouch I had taken from the glove box. Inside was a compact plastic glucose meter, modified by the same engineer who had rigged his insulin pump to fight his vampirism. I uncapped a canister of blood test strips, pulled out a green one, and stuck it into the meter. “Which arm?”
He blew a stream of smoke in my face, but extended his left arm. I jabbed a silver needle into the skin and pressed the drop of blood to the test strip. The meter beeped a few seconds later, the screen reading 23.
“Am I clean, boss?” Ted asked with a scowl.
“You’re within normal range.” The green strips were calibrated for Stokerus vamps. Anything under 60 meant Ted was sticking to his nonhuman diet. “The bug-eater who tried to kill me used to be a Porter.”
Ted paused in mid-drag. “They turned a Porter? That’s ballsy.”
“What’s going on, Ted? Why come after us now?”
“Don’t ask me.” He sucked his finger clean, then dipped it into the thermos again for the dog. “If it was up to me, I’d have sent someone to off you years ago.”
I sighed. “And if I’d followed orders, I’d have left your ashes in the bonfire pit at Camp Gichigamin.”
He didn’t answer.
“You’re here because I convinced the Porters you could be useful to us.” I leaned closer. “If you’re going to give me attitude instead of answers, then you’re not useful anymore.”
His attention shifted to the detonator.
“Go ahead, take it. I can make another. Any libriomancer can.”
“All I know is you aren’t the only one with problems,” he said sullenly. “Vampires have been disappearing for a few months now. We figured they’d been dusted, that maybe another idiot was trying to play slayer. It happens every once in a while. They don’t usually last long. But then a few of the missing vampires showed up again and started causing trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” asked Lena.
“Hunting humans. Fighting and killing other vamps.” Ted chugged the rest of the blood, then licked his lips, leaving a faint residue on his beard and mustache. “That’s nothing new. Every newborn vampire thinks he’s hot shit until someone else pounds the shit right out of him and shows him what’s what, but this is different. One of these upstarts even slew her own sire.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said.
“Nah, the way I hear, this was a southerner. They don’t mess with their makers. They can’t.” He lit another cigarette and flicked the first butt into the corner.
“Southerner?” Lena asked.
“Sanguinarius Henricus.” Another relatively young bloodline, one which had arisen from Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series. “Ted’s right. Harris’ vampires are intrinsically incapable of acting against their masters.”
Ted wouldn’t hesitate to lie to me, but he was a lousy actor. The shotgun, the chain smoking, the twitchiness in his hands… everything suggested he was genuinely spooked.
“They say you’re the ones behind this,” Ted commented. “Maybe even old man Gutenberg himself.”
“‘The biggest liar in the world is They Say,’” I muttered. “Douglas Malloch.”
Ted stared. “Who?”
“Never mind. Get dressed, Ted.”
His lips pulled back, a threat display which would have been far more effective had his fangs not been sitting in a Porter lab downstate. “Why?”
“I need a bloodhound, someone who can sense and track other vampires.” That power was one of the reasons Ted had returned to the relative seclusion of the U. P., where others of his kind wouldn’t be constantly triggering his territorial instincts. “You’re going to help me check out Ray’s place, and then you’re going to lead us to the bastard that killed him.”
“The hell I am!”
“Hell is the other option, sure.” I raised the detonator. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you really are. What you did to those boys.”
His tongue flicked out, moistening his lower lip. “I been clean for years now. You know that, eh? Whatever’s going on down there, I want nothing to do with it.”