Jack Crow awoke with a start from some nameless horrible on the flight from Rome and beheld the angelic face of his newest team member, Father Adam, sleeping across from him.
He's a sweet kid, thought Jack. I'll probably get him killed, too.
Then he went back to sleep because any other thoughts were better than these.
"I need a vampire," said Carl Joplin for the hundredth time. Cat burped and ignored him. Annabelle placed a soft white hand on Carl's great fat shoulder and said, "I know, dear."
The rest of Team Crow had been at the bar at the Monterey Airport for four hours. One hour to get primed for the homecoming and the three more the plane turned out to be late. It was not a pretty sight.
Except, thought Cat, for Annabelle. She was always a pretty sight. Even when she wasn't. He propped his elbow very carefully against the edge of the bar, made a fist with his hand, put his cheek on it, and examined her.
He had known her his whole life and... Waitaminute. That wasn't true. He had known her six years. No. Seven years. Almost seven years, since before her late husband, Basil O'Bannon, had founded Vampire$ Inc. And anyway, she was still the same. Still pretty and still plump and still mostly blond and still forty-something or sixty-something years old - it didn't seem to apply - and still able to outdrink God.
Time to take a piss, he decided. He lifted himself off the barstool, careful not to get the toe of his boot caught on the railing like last time, and ambled off on his mission.
Carl Joplin looked up from rubbing his wondrous belly and said, "I need a vampire."
"I know, dear," said Annabelle.
"It's gotta be tested!" he insisted.
"I know, dear. We'll ask Jack when the plane gets in." Carl snarled and sipped his drink. "Jack! Shit!" He was still mad at Jack and likely to stay that way. "Jack!" he repeated disgustedly.
Carl Joplin was the weapons man and the tool man for the team. He made the crossbows for Jack and Cat's wooden knives and everything else they took with them into battle, but did he ever get to go into battle? Hell, no! "Too valuable," Jack would always say. Somebody had to be free and clear of the fight at all times to make sure the fight could go on. Carl could buy that. It made sense. But how come it had to be him every goddamn time?
But it was. Sure, he was a little overweight and maybe pushing sixty but that was no reason not to let him duke it out just once. Just one time, baby!
The detector was his best chance. Joplin had actually come up with a vampire detector based on the presumed electromagnetic energy of any object and/or critter able to totally absorb all sunlight. It was an ingenious gadget but it required a vampire to test it. Carl knew damn well they could never hope - or, for that matter, be so stupid as to try - to capture a fiend and bring it to him. Ergo, he would have to be there on sight to run the buttons and knobs the rest of the peckerwoods were too damned ignorant to follow in the first place. He'd get into it one way or the other, by God!
And in the meantime he went back to rubbing his great belly and snarling and refusing to see Annabelle's smile when he did it. Which reminded him: how come he was sloppy drunk and she wasn't? How come she never was? Huh? Explain me that!
Cat, weaving his way back through the tables from the rest room, was wondering the very same thing. He had never in all of his whole entire life seen Annabelle drunk. And she drank as much as anybody, didn't she? Well, didn't she?
Did she? He thought back. Yup. She did. In fact, she was the one who had really gotten the serious stuff going with that schnapps shit. Waitaminute! Schnapps! She always drank schnapps! Maybe if I drank schna... Waitaminuteagain! I am drinking schnapps. I've been drinking it. That's how I got so polluted.
He plopped back down on his stool thinking: Mystery of the Universe!
"I need a vampire," said Carl once again at Cat's reappearance.
"In a minute," Cat finally retorted.
And they hissed at each other.
Annabelle smiled again. But not too much or she was certain she'd lose her balance, keel backward off the stool, skirts flying, and crack her head on the side of the bar like a ripe grapefruit.
And then, she giggled silently to herself, little purple butterflies would sparkle out.
She had never been so thoroughly plastered in her life. She doubted if anyone had. And the thought of actually being able to sit down and pee was her notion of heaven. But do women pee? Sure they do. No. They dew. Horses sweat, men perspire, and women dew. Right? No, that was something else.
But urinate sounded so dreadful. So unladylike.
And if she didn't risk weaving to the rest room in front of the men she was about to do something a lot more unladylike. Being a lady - setting the standard - was paramount. She bore the entire responsibility, she was quite certain, for Team Crow.
In a very real sense, more than she would ever fully comprehend, this was quite true. Annabelle O'Bannon was more than a simple regal beauty who kept her raucous men in line. She was their symbol for the rest of the world they were surely going to die trying to protect. She was why they kept going out to fight knowing damn well they would eventually lose. It had happened to everyone else. It would happen to them. But this way it wouldn't happen to Annabelle.
They didn't know this, her men. That is, they had never consciously voiced it, even inside their own heads. But it was so. It was so because she, Annabelle, was so. Just so.
She had that way with men only certain ladies and other magical creatures possessed. A way of making them sit down and eat their porridge or drink their drink. Of making them shut up and listen to someone else talk.
She could make them wear ties.
She also possessed the unique ability to actually stop violence, like the time she made Jack put that Harley down - and not on that poor moaning biker like he wanted.
None of this was getting her off the barstool and into the ladies' room. And she simply had to go. Then a thought occurred.
"Young man," she called to the middle-aged bartender, "I'll have another." Then she slid off the stool and landed, thank God, on both high-heeled feet and had weaved her way several steps toward sweet release before Carl and Cat could get over the shock.
The two men looked at one another. Another drink? Another-goddamned-drink? She was going to have another round and here they were, the two of them big tough guy Fighters of Evil trying desperately to focus on their cocktail napkins for balance, for chrissakes, and she's having another...
But what could they do? What choice did they have? It was awful and grisly to do it but the alternative was worse, giving in was worse.
Carl gulped, said, "Me too."
The bartender, bright, sober, and sadistic, asked Cat, "Another all the way around?"
And Cat, his face gray and his life passing before his eyes, nodded dully.
Annabelle's timing was, as always, exquisite. She had made it almost out of sight while the men were occupied with machismo. She paused at the entrance to the bar and, with apparent unconcern, spoke back over her shoulder, "Young man," she called sweetly to the bartender, "I guess not after all."
All three men turned toward her, the bartender with hands full of fixings. "You don't want another, lady?"
Annabelle smiled. "I guess not."
The bartender's annoyance barely showed. "You're sure?" he pursued.
She paused, seemed to take the question of chemical suicide seriously, then shook her pretty head again. "I guess not," she repeated and then she was gone.
Her men all but leapt at the opening she had provided.
"I guess not, too."
"Me either, now that I think about it." Both burst out in the rapid staccato of machine-gun fire.
The bartender stared at them, glanced at the rest of the lounge, which was completely empty, and sighed. Too good to be true, he thought. He'd known that just three people making his overhead for the day was too good to be true. But still, they'd almost made it.
Annabelle neither heard nor cared about any of this. She was too busy stamping her awkward path to the ladies room door, bashing it open with both hands and part of her hairdo, jerking herself awkwardly into a stall, unsheathing herself, and then reveling in one of those mini-orgasms reserved for those lucky creatures made in God's image.
Later she thought: I'm so tired.
It had been a busy two weeks for her. With Jack in Rome it was left to Cat and Carl and herself (meaning her) to handle all the arrangements. Contacting the next of kin had been easier than it might have been. Crusader types, she had long ago discovered, had a tendency to be loners.
Except for Anthony. She had gone to San Antonio to tell Mrs. Beverley in person. When that sainted woman had opened the door and seen her she had known. The two of them had held each other and rocked and cried and rocked and cried for two straight hours, their minds filled with the rich memories of the sweet, handsome, brave huge black Anthony they had loved so, much. No loss, except of her husband Basil, had ever touched her so much. And she had known right then that when Jack's and Cat's time came - as it certainly would - that would be all for her.
She knew it was up to her to keep going. She knew that Carl Joplin, as amazingly competent as he truly was, would need her desperately. Would fail, probably, without her help.
She knew this and she didn't care. When Jack and Cat went, that would be it. Even the hinted image of that loss, so wickedly brutal, so thoroughly devastating, was intertwined with one of herself sitting quietly in her room lining up the pills to swallow. Interesting enough, it bad never occurred to her that she might die another way. Vampires? She had never seen one, never wished to, and could think of no reason in the world why she ever should. That was the men's job. They were hers.
Later, of course, when the horror was roaring in on them, it would be different. But she couldn't have known that now.
Her thoughts turned to the move. They were leaving Pebble Beach and moving back home to Texas. To Dallas. They were going to miss their mansion with its view of the bay and the sculptured golf courses and the ocean fog rolling across the tops of the pine trees and, most of all, the miniature deer eating her flowers every morning.
She had claimed, loudly and often, that she hated the creatures and believed them to be a scourge of nature. The world, she insisted, would be better off if every single deer was burned at the stake.
"Bambi, too?" someone would invariably ask.
"Especially Bambi," she would sharply retort. "That vile little mutt has only encouraged them."
This fooled absolutely no one, of course. But still every morning she would put, on her sneakers and her one pair of blue jeans and her late husband's lumberjack shirt, tie her hair back in a scarf, grab her weapon (the back porch broom), and rush out to do battle. Everyone would race to the windows, even braving some truly monumental hangovers, to laugh and applaud and tap on the glass and just generally egg on the deer. Especially that one awful creature who was certain was the leader. So smug and cocky and sure self, it would actually stop eating and stand there, just stand there and stare at her as she ran at it waving the broom, showing not one ounce of fear until just before she could whack it, and then vault effortlessly over the ten-foot fence she had had especially constructed. The boys loved him and named him Bambi after that silly movie and - And.
And the boys...
The boys were all gone. The boys, her boys were all dead, all destroyed horribly and forever and...
And for a long time the only sound in the room came from the muffled sobs filling the tiny stall.
It was why they were moving. The Zoo, the nickname for the wing now holding seven unoccupied bedrooms, was empty. Empty and hollow and dark and sad. It had been the only post massacre order Jack had been able to manage. Near-incoherent with pain and rage and shame, his last comment before boarding the plane to Europe was to take everything home to Texas where they belonged.
Annabelle had thus been left with the project of packing everything up, flying to Dallas, selecting and buying another house (with room for Carl's workshop), and most difficult of all, sorting out the boys' belongings.
So many belongings. And such, such... boyish things. She smiled at that thought and wiped away another tear.
Because they were such boys. They were grown men, too. All of them. The youngest almost twenty-five, the oldest just over forty, older even than Cat, the second in command.
But they were such boys, too. Oh, she knew why. She did. She understood why. It was their job, the nature of it, the fear of it, the...
The certainty of it.
They weren't going to get married and raise children and grow old and pass away retired in some resort community. They were going to die. They were going to be killed by some desperate lunge of talon or teeth, too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it. And then they were going to have to be staked and beheaded by the survivors who couldn't even use the funeral as a time to mourn because of it.
They were going to die. And soon. And they knew it. Every single one of them knew it. They were going to die.
And so they were kids. Her boys. She packed up so many toys. Video games and stereo sets and model airplanes and pinball games (everybody had to have his own machine) and hookah pipes and science fiction books and comic books, some of which were, inexplicably to Annabelle, in Japanese. (She could never understand that. None of the boys spoke Japanese, much less read it.) And then there were the stacks of porno books and magazines and she found it was apparently legal to actually entitle a magazine Fuck Me.
So much stuff and plenty of money for it - the Man saw to that knowing they would never live to accumulate their own fortunes. And they spent it.
But what was appalling and, she admitted it, endearing to Annabelle was what they did with it all. All that healthy maleness and alcohol and fear pent up in even so large a place as the mansion made for an extremely vibrant household to say the least.
The alcohol. So much alcohol. Team Crow got dead drunk the way normal people had a single cocktail. The monthly bill for liquor consumed on the premises was over a thousand dollars. And that didn't even count the bar tabs Annabelle was forever driving around to pay off. The huge garage area was filled with Corvettes and four-wheel drives and motorcycles everyone was too drunk to drive home. After eight DWIs in two weeks, Jack had installed a taxi-home policy for everyone not going out with Cat (who drunk, could talk any cop out of his gun).
But it wasn't just the booze. They were none of them alcoholics. It was just all that overgrown energy. They terrorized the maid service, inevitably springing themselves on the poor women stark naked and dripping from the shower and offering to help. It was so hard to keep cooks they were finally forbidden to even enter the kitchen while the cook was on the property. If they wanted something they had to phone in and ask for it. The amount of food pleased and frightened the cooks at the same time. They were able to consume astonishing amounts of food. Any kind of food. Junk food. Gourmet buffets. Munchies. Anything. Everything.
They never got fat. None of them - except for Carl, of course - even got beer bellies. Every morning they would get up and work out rigorously, the sweat running salty past their grins. It was not that they were especially disciplined. They most certainly were not. They were... committed. They were faithful. And they were alone together. It wasn't just each one of them who worried about himself. If one couldn't spin his body around quick enough with that brutish wooden stake in his grip, then it might not be just him slashed from throat to thighs. It might be one of his mates. No. It would be one of his mates. Because there was, quite literally, no one else in the world to save them but them.
It was why, recalled Annabelle, Jack had forbidden wrestling matches. Which were always happening in the stairwells, for some reason. She supposed it was because those broad shoulders were always clipping past one another in a hurry and then one thing led to another and...
Jack wouldn't have it. They were already wrapped far too tightly to be adrenaline-bruising their only kin.
So instead they tore up the house. That time they decided to play indoor golf because of the rain.
She busied herself in front of the lounge mirror, thinking back and trying without success to keep the smile from her face. To be fair, Jack had not even been in town. He and Cat had gone up to San Francisco with Anthony to watch his old team beat the 49'ers. But that didn't mean she believed for one single instant Jack would have stopped them. Probably would have just sat there in that big chair of his and laughed and bet on the winner.
Indoor golf. She sighed. They had broken six windows. Three of them cut glass.
She paused and inspected her appearance before returning to the bar. She supposed she looked fine.
For what she was.
For what was left. For what there was to look forward to. I'm so tired, she thought again. And then she thought: No. That's a lie: I'm frightened. And then she thought: No. I'm both. Both.
Jack! Hurry back. Hurry back to us and still be you!
Father Adam looked to his left, at the seventy-ish man sleeping across the aisle from him and said in his silent TV commentator's voice, There are, for your information, sir, over six hundred exorcisms officially performed in America each year. And to you, it's just something that made a great movie that may or may not have been true once but isn't now.
Adam's gaze slid across the aisle to Jack, dozing in front of him.
And this man, he continued, kills vampires for a living. How about that?
Adam sighed, resting his eyes on Crow a bit longer before turning and viewing the mountains of the western United States sweeping below.
I'm in a dream. But maybe not. This is real and this has been happening, bile flowing from the Beast, since the dawn of man and before. This isn't a dream.
He turned again to look at Jack Crow.
It's simply that this man is a movie. A walking, talking, bleeding, cussing, bigger-than-life bear of a man. He's a movie, just being alive.
But movies aren't real, are they? he asked himself.
Neither is the priesthood. Isn't that why you're here?
He started to ignore himself. But then he decided he no longer had to. He was here now and into it. He was no longer some lanky, dark-curled kid too pretty for his own good hiding out from girls in seminary and from the meat-eaters' man's world in his black-and-white king's X uniform.
He looked again around the cabin. It wasn't the real world of this plane, perhaps. Of men striving to earn first-class seats or pilot's stripes. It wasn't the real world of men at all.
But it was the real world of man.
Of man and God.
And he, Adam the schoolyard trembler, had grown up and come here to fight for them both. At last.
To the last.
He slept.
I don't know who else to get, thought Jack Crow. And I'm tired of getting them. We need the best kind of person around. No one less will do.
But they will die. And that means I have to find the best men I know and condemn them to a certain violent end just because they're the best.
Shit.
And they always said yes. That was the worst part of it. The good ones, once they knew it was being done, had to be doing it.
So they did it and they died.
Doubleshit.
Oh, God! Please don't call us now! There's only four of us left and this kid-priest and one of 'em's a middle-aged woman and another is pushing sixty and fat and damn well not scared enough for me and another is the finest man I've ever known.
And, tripleshit, the last one is me.
Please, phone, don't ring!
The plane landed and Jack Crow shook himself hard and reminded himself that he was supposed to be a leader of some kind so: Rock and roll, goddammit! Off your butt and off this plane and here we go again! Come on!
Don't think about the phone.
They knew the priest was coming but they didn't know anything about him. Jack strode through the gate to Annabelle with Adam close behind. He leaned down and kissed her and said, "Folks, this is Adam."
"Father Adam," Adam amended firmly. Team Crow exchanged rolled eyes.
"I'm her Royal Highness Annabelle."
"Lord High-Muck-a-muck Carl Joplin."
Adam blinked, stared at them. Cat, grinning, stepped forward and shook his hand.
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," said Cat. "I am the Great and Powerful Oz."
And then they were all walking rapidly toward baggage claim without further explanation. Adam found himself offered Annabelle's arm. He took it and shut up and walked.
"I need a vampire," began Carl.
Jack barely glanced at him. "Is it working?"
"It was working last night."
Jack stopped. They all stopped and stared at Carl.
"Well, to tell the truth, I don't know what made it beep then." They resumed walking. "But it should work," Carl persisted. "And it's gotta be tested."
"How does it work?" Jack wanted to know.
"You wouldn't understand it, Jack, and you know it."
"Hmm. Possibly. Then how are we supposed to test it?"
"We ain't. I am."
Jack sighed, shook his head. "Oh, great. Here we go again with your - "
"Goddammit, Jack! There ain't anybody else!"
"How do you figure that?"
They had reached the baggage claim area. They stopped. Carl took a deep breath and hitched up his pants. He began counting off fingers.
"Well, Annabelle can't do it 'cause she watches the soaps during the day. You're supposed to be guarding my ass while I'm doing it. Cat..."
"I could do it," Cat offered with a sly grin.
Carl gave him a dirty look. "What do you know about the electromagnetic spectrum?"