Chapter Twenty-Four: Defeat the Youngbloods

After their human entertainment was ushered away to table service in the club below, the six of them lazed about as the drugs slowly washed away. They could get high from drinking blood, but the highs never lasted long. Vera's mixed trip of LSD, MDMA, and weed should have lasted until morningtime, but it hit its high after fifteen or twenty minutes, in the middle of her romp with Lisa, and petered out before much past an hour. But, on the bright side, there were no hangovers and nobody had ever heard of a vampire getting an overdose, sliding into addiction, or contracting a bloodborne disease. They sipped on expensive port, which did nothing to get them drunk, but which tasted amazing, and Carlos fielded questions about being a vampire, looking to wow the newbies with his knowledge. Lisa eventually asked him about vampire powers.

"So we, like, live forever, right?" she asked.

Carlos nodded. "Unless something kills you. Stay out of the sun and don't let anybody get to you when you're asleep."

"Any other cool powers?"

"We can't turn into a bat or any of that shit... pretty much just the great senses, the no bleeding thing... super-strong bones. Ebony has all kinds of ideas about how our bones manage to be almost invincible. And, of course, we're a lot stronger and faster. I was a pretty strong dude, before," he said. "When you're a familiar, it doesn't take a lot to stay in great shape, so I was pretty jacked. I'd bench sets right around three hundred fifty pounds. But now I can do like twelve hundred... up a hundred from when I turned eight years ago..."

"So vampires get stronger over time?" Vera asked.

"Yeah. You can't really do a fitness regimen, because our muscles don't work that way... so whatever shape you turn in, that's the shape you stay in. You inherit a fraction of the strength of the vampire that turned you, so some vamps get a head start, and then you get stronger over time for whatever reason. But it takes a looong time, though. Like I'd estimate that Master Xia is about as strong as I am. She's half my size but five hundred years older, so you do the calculations."

"No way are you as strong as Master Xia," Carrie said. "But she's also more than five hundred years older than you."

Carlos shrugged. "Agree to disagree," he said. "It doesn't matter... you get stronger and faster by roughly three times at first, give or take depending on who turned you. And, over time, you stay sated for longer and some of your weaknesses lessen... like you can eventually even walk around in the middle of the day..."

"Um," Lisa said. She shared a glance with Vera.

"What do you mean, 'eventually walk around' during the day?" Vera asked. "I mean... I turned like a week ago, and I go out during the day like every day."

"Sure, maybe, with full-coverage and welding goggles..."

"With SPF100 and an umbrella," Lisa said.

"Bullshit," Carrie said, her dark eyes flitting between Vera and Lisa. "Baby vamps get crisped by the sun. Even if you're Ebony and you've got dark skin and Sophia-fucking-Clandest is your maker, it takes centuries to just walk around like a normal person... doesn't it?"

Vera shrugged. "Have you tried sunscreen? I don't know what to say."

Vera didn't know what to say... and she wasn't sure how much more she should say. She was starting to suspect that she wasn't a typical beginner vampire. She'd turned courtesy of a massive overdose of venom – a few times what it usually took to turn a familiar – and it was from at least a dozen different vampires. To the best of her knowledge, nothing like that had ever been done before in the history of vampires. Sure, she had to be careful in the sunlight... and, sure, Lisa was a bit more vulnerable than she was... but it sounded like the rest of the Youngbloods were a lot more sensitive than either of them. The Youngbloods might not be the best source of vampire life hacks... except maybe one...

"You mentioned not letting anybody get to you while you sleep... do you guys have hideouts or something?"

"Something like that," Carrie said. "There are two prevailing opinions on that in our coven. The first is that you should have a secure, secluded hideaway that only you know about, and the other is that you should have a respectable residence under guard by loyal familiars and lots of surveillance. Regardless, I say surveillance is a good idea because anybody caught on film attacking another coven vampire... even a vampire from another coven, if they respect our territory... you're in deep shit if you attack one of us without the go-ahead of the Lady and the Masters."

"But, sometimes, they will give the go-ahead?"

"Sometimes," Carrie agreed. Without elaborating, she leaned over the railing and looked out over the Crimson Queen floor. "Looks like things are slowing down around here. Why don't we take a walk?"

+++++

Only when they got out into the night did Vera realize how stuffy the club had been, especially an hour before at the peak of its activity. Now, it was an hour and a half after midnight and, while the night was warm, a pleasant sea breeze blew through the magnolias lining the boulevard. Katydids were calling, the air smelled of blossoms, and it was easy to forget they were in the middle of North Carolina's third largest city.

"When I was a kid, this was all empty," Carlos said. By birth year, he was the oldest of the bunch – 52 years – and he looked the oldest, too, at about two decades younger than his actual age. "They built all this shit up around World War 2 when the port was churning out ships, and then all of the jobs went away after the war and the people left. There's still a neighborhood in Norfolk called Little Palmetto where a bunch of the welders and shipbuilders moved."

"Thanks, gramps," Carrie said, but she put her arm around him and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

She strutted in the front of the group with Carlos on her right and Ebony on her left, about five inches in height differentiating each of them... Ebony was Vera's height, or maybe an inch shorter, and Carlos had to be about six foot three. Matt had dropped back a bit to walk alongside Vera and Lisa, taking appreciative glances in their direction... it didn't come across as creepy, though. It was more like an artist appreciating the aesthetics of the two of them sauntering along in the night, the gentle breeze fluttering the fabric of their dresses, hand-in-hand staring out into the night. The group veered out toward the street and Vera looked up to see the edifice of the old St. Mark's church with its big alabaster cross and its little cherubim statues. She chuckled.

"You lot really don't like crosses, huh?"

"Holy symbols are creepy," Matt said. "Like, any holy symbol. It's a weird vampire phobia."

Vera looked up at the cross, and part of her understood what Matt meant. She understood what the cross symbolized, and that vampires (presumably) were beyond that promise of salvation. That they weren't welcome. But she hadn't offered herself to Abaddon... not in good faith, anyway... and whatever phobia she had, it was just that. An irrational fear. She minced up the church steps, forcing herself to look at the big cross looming high, deeply shadowed by the yellow-orange sodium lights below it.

"Doesn't it give you the willies?" Matt said.

Vera shrugged. "I think I've still got some drugs in my system," she said, though that was only part of it. Maybe it was just how she was mentally framing it, but the gripping fear of a holy symbol had ebbed to a niggling twinge of anxiety. And her own current lack of reaction gave her an idea. "Has anybody ever tried vampire therapy? To, you know, get over the whole holy symbols and unwelcome places phobia? It seems like it might be helpful."

"We once had a psychotherapist," Matt said. "When I first became a familiar... way before my time as a vampire, maybe twenty years ago..."

"You became a familiar fifteen years ago," Carrie called back.

"Fine. Then fourteen or fifteen years ago. No idea what happened to the guy, but he was really into Jung... not so much into Freud... he had all kinds of theories about how to ease our anxieties, our blood cravings, all of that... but so far as I know, it never panned out. And the guy just dropped off the map."

That worried Vera a bit. Earlier in the evening, Carlos had estimated that they added a new vampire to the coven every 'year or two'… but there were only four Youngbloods if you didn't include Vera and Lisa, and only twenty-seven vampires in the whole coven - Vera, Lisa, and the Youngbloods included. That indicated a pretty high attrition rate, vampires either skipping town for bloodier pastures or something bad transpiring to take them out of the equation. She suspected that vampires who wouldn't play by the rules were either told to leave or forced to leave through whatever means. And, knowing what she did about Erasmus Moody, those means weren't likely to be too friendly.

They walked past the St. Anne's Cemetery but didn't go inside – too many crosses, Matt muttered. Vera couldn't help but giggle at that.

"What?" He seemed amused, too.

"Vampires who refuse to go into graveyards. That seems a bit ironic, doesn't it?"

He chuckled. "I suppose it does. Really, there's no big deal about it. Crosses aren't so bad – whenever there are two lines intersecting perpendicular to one another, there one is! It's when they're used as a holy symbol that they have their power over us. And, in a graveyard, it mostly depends. A gravestone shaped like a Celtic cross? That's just a marker in the ground. But engrave 'gone to meet her maker' into that stone, and you've suddenly got yourself a promise of the hereafter... a holy symbol. So most crosses aren't anything more than two lines, but any old cemetery will have enough of the other kind that it becomes a minefield of heebie-jeebies."

"What about the Abaddon symbol?" Lisa asked. She ran her fingers along the wrought iron of the cemetery fence. "Isn't that a holy symbol?"

"Yeah, but that's ours." Matt said. He lifted a little pendant from under his shirt and showed it to them: a platinum medallion engraved with the Abaddon symbol. And, ironically, that one did give Vera a bit of the 'heebie-jeebies'. She forced herself to hide it.

"That's beautiful," she said – and, indeed, it was very well-done. "Did you get that custom-made?"

"You might say that. I made it myself a few years back, right after I was turned." He handed Lisa a fancy, glossy business card and Vera leaned in to take a peek: Matthew Valentine Studios. She'd actually heard of him – he was famous even, if only in art circles. And Matthew Valentine was, apparently, a vampire. "Show up anytime you like," he said. "I've been getting into metalwork lately, and I have two apprentices – apprentice-slash-familiars – who do good work for a lot less than what I charge."

Matt unexpectedly reached for Vera's wrist, and she instinctively intercepted his arm, squeezing it in her vampire grip – but he was a vampire, too, and his bones were just about unbreakable. He looked her in the eyes and waited for Vera to release her grip, which she did with a bashful smile.

"Those are some reflexes," he said. His hand slid back to her wrist, nimble fingers sliding up and tracing along the band of her rose gold bracelet. His hands were warm and his grip gentle and sure. "This is one of mine. An early work... nothing special, but competent enough. Carrie must really like you to loan it out like that."

"She loaned it to me," Lisa said. "I asked very nicely."

He shot her a mirthful look and took his time examining her form, presumably to catalog her jewelry. "I'll bet."

"Where is Carrie?" Vera asked. At some point, Carrie had vanished... as had Ebony. And Carlos had dropped back and was even then inching toward Lisa's side.

"Off to do who-knows-what," Carlos said. His hand went up with a casual ease, and he ran his fingers through Lisa's hair, traced his finger along the shoulder strap of her dress. It reminded Vera of Master Xia's creepily possessive gesture. "They're sort of an item, though they're definitely not exclusive. What about you two?"

Perhaps Carrie and Ebony had gone off for some alone time. That was plausible. More likely, Vera considered, was that they'd gone off to give the boys (well... men... male vampires... whatever) time with the beautiful new recruits. And Vera was acutely aware that Carlos and Matt knew exactly what they were doing, and that they were probably very good at doing it.

"We hadn't really talked about it," Lisa said.

She reached out and squeezed Vera's hand. Vera nodded – of course they were exclusive. Right? She glanced over to Lisa, beautiful in the moonlight, her hair shimmering. Her evening dress was a sexy little thing, maroon with a strappy lace vest, its neckline revealing the whole upper slope of her breasts, and below that its belly cutout displaying a few square inches of exquisitely toned abs and her little jangling belly piercing. Her dress was a swishy little thing that, while it came almost to her knees, waved in sinuous motions to her stride, long, lithe legs swishing on display and the promise of untold treasures above its hem. It was probably the most beautiful that Vera had ever seen her... Lisa, dressed to impress, was probably the most beautiful person that Vera had ever seen in person. Frankly, she wondered what Faustian backroom bargain Carlos had made to Matt to relinquish getting the first crack at her... maybe they meant to share...

"Well?" Carlos said. "Why don't you talk about it now? Come on, I've got a cool place to show you. Very private."

+++++

The 'cool place' was another block down, a dilapidated old building that clearly used to be a church but had been stripped of all religious imagery. The front lintel still had Presbyterian vaguely visible from where the letters had once protected the concrete from Palmetto City's mid-Century pollution. The big front doors were heavily padlocked – not that padlocks would stop a vampire – but Carlos had the keys in any case. He creaked the doors open and gestured them inside.

The interior was in the process of getting stripped to its bare essentials. All of the iconography was gone, obviously, but some of the wallpaper and carpeting was still there – dingy burnt-orange carpeting spotted with what looked to be cigarette burns. Most of the remaining interior walls had graffiti on them. Violet sucks great cock! one of them boasted. In hell!!! The message below it said, followed by a crude but clearly well-endowed demon. Vera wondered why Carlos had taken them to a dilapidated ex-church. And he told them unprompted:

"I got this place for a song about a year ago," he said. "It was a church, obviously, and then a rec center for a few years, before shutting down a decade back. But it's got good bones... I'm not sure what to do with it yet, if I should wait for the neighborhood to gentrify and then sell it, or maybe turn it into something nice and then hope the place gentrifies. What do you girls think?"

"Women," Vera corrected – she wondered whether she should be so defensive, given that she:

A) Hadn't been an adult for all that long.

B) Had been a woman for even less time than that.

"It's... got a lot of potential," Lisa said. "It's huge..."

"Eight thousand square feet."

"If you made it, like, a gastropub or craft beer place, you'd have the neighborhood perking up in no time," Lisa said.

"Why not a club?"

"Because then Carrie would hate you forever."

"Beautiful and smart," Carlos said... and he put his brawny arm around her. Vera's fists balled up. "Actually, though, it's even better than that. Check this out."

They walked across the gutted-out chapel, their footsteps echoing in the empty space, and out to a side door. There had once been a side-room of some kind there, but part of it had collapsed from disrepair and Carlos's people had hauled all of the scrap away. All that remained were two and a half walls, a scrap of roof, and bare concrete flooring. He sighed and looked into the night sky, perhaps imagining what he might turn the place into. It would, Vera had to admit, be a great spot for outdoor seating. It wouldn't take much to make it into a really nice, welcoming space.

"I think I'll submit the plans tomorrow – file them with the coven as a vampire-run business, get the ball rolling on it," he stated. He pulled Lisa in close, his hand creeping down her side... "But I've got something even cooler in the basement. Let's-"

He didn't get a chance to say much more, because they were all bowled over by a great whump of force... one that Vera recognized. It wasn't the first time she'd been smooshed by that great, gauzy, magical hand. It was Eva's spell, and she'd obviously refined it further. How she'd tracked them without any of the vampires noticing, Vera couldn't guess. She rolled and struggled to her feet, her eyes tracking as Eva vaulted over the half-gone wall, clutching half a dozen silver spikes in her hand. She spotted Vera, frowned and, before Vera could react, lunged forward and stabbed a silver spike into Matt's chest before the vampire could even struggle to his feet. Vera struggled forward, her feet moving like she was trudging through molasses. Before she could quite grab Eva, the witch somersaulted into a crouch and then stabbed Carlos.

Carlos was almost on his feet despite the spell. Eva stabbed him in the chest with a silver spike, but his hand shot out and grabbed her by the collar. She stabbed him in the forearm and pulled free, her shirt ripping in his iron grip. He grabbed her again, this time by the arm. His fangs extruded, he pulled her close, and Vera could feel the spell's power starting to fluctuate. But Eva managed to shove another silver spike into his chest next to the first one, staggering him. Then she was off and darting toward Lisa, another silver spike in her fist, her hands now streaked with inky violet vampire blood. Vera wasn't about to let her kill Lisa. The spell's effects were wavering, and her leap managed to clear the whole eight feet to Lisa. She hissed and sailed through the air, grabbing Eva's wrist before she could redirect her blow toward Vera. Eva clearly had some pretty advanced combat training – despite Vera's vampire reflexes, Eva managed to twist and land a solid blow right at Vera's solar plexus... only with her fist, though - no silver spike, and so Vera barely felt it.

Vera gripped her other wrist, but not before Eva brought out some sort of amulet... she recognized the symbol from the Olde Yew Bible... it was a holy symbol, a sacred symbol. Instead of warding Vera off, though, she only felt the pounding pulse of rage. She yanked the amulet out of Eva's hand and crushed it, semiprecious gemstones clattering against the concrete floor. She squeezed Eva's other wrist until she dropped the spike and then hissed again, lifting Eva off the ground by the throat as if she weighed nothing, preparing to throttle the witch into the ground until she stopped moving.

"She's mine," Carlos growled. Despite being stabbed in or near the heart with two silver witch spikes (or whatever Eva called them), he was alive and he was angry. He pulled them out, wincing. The whole front of his shirt was wet with vampire blood, but the wounds hadn't been fatal. He pulled the spike out of his forearm and paced toward Eva. "I'm going to take pleasure in draining you, bitch. Know that your own blood will heal these wounds and that I'm going to find your witch sisters, whoever they are, and I'm going to drain them... slowly." He looked Vera in the eye. "She's mine."

Vera was sorely tempted. She was tempted to give Eva to Carlos. Eva had caught Vera and Lisa in the same trap as the others, had treated them as if they were as bad as the others. She'd even tried to kill Lisa again and she'd fought against Vera when she intervened. The witch was a bit unhinged... more than a bit unhinged. She'd betrayed her Olde Yew oath and was deserving of punishment. But Vera couldn't let Carlos kill her because of what it would mean for the others. Carlos was an inveterate bountyhunter with the senses of a vampire to boot - thus, he had an excellent skillset for tracking down Maxie and Gloria, who weren't deserving of punishment... unless they'd conspired with Eva about the whole thing... unless...

"I said... she's mine," Carlos said. He took Vera's wrist in his bloody grip and pulled Eva, still dangling and struggling for breath, toward himself. Vera pulled back, though Carlos was certainly stronger than her...

Or maybe not. She pulled away from him, tossed Eva aside, and Carlos didn't have the muscle to stop her. Maybe he was weakened from Vera's spikes... or maybe Vera was just a much stronger vampire than him. She crouched, picked up two of the discarded spikes, and plunged them back into Carlos's chest so quickly that he hadn't yet overcome his shock at being overpowered by Vera. She leapt at him, toppling the big man over, and then mounted him, holding his struggling body down, holding the spikes in as black blood spread beneath him, holding them in as Lisa tried to pull her off. And, eventually, Carlos stopped moving, stopped bleeding dark ichor and his eyes glazed over. Vera looked over to Lisa, now inspecting the damage to her dress.

"Sorry I pushed you so hard," Vera said.

"You... you killed Carlos," Lisa said. "Vera... what the fuck did you do?"

Nearby, Eva struggled to her feet, rubbing her neck. "What she promised to do."

OvidLemma

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