In the name of the White

There were more lost pet posters pointing the way towards this girl, Penny. The trail of hopscotch courts led right to her home. She must have had no idea that we were coming. Lex was already thinking ahead. She was probably no precog, or else she’d be on the move away from us. If she was a telepath, she’d pick up on the danger too and bolt. She’s probably a telekinetic, then. Better watch out, little kid or not.

We rolled by the house slowly, casing it like burglars. Except it wasn’t the silverware we were coming for, it was a child. I wanted to jump out and get this done. A little kid wasn’t going to be much of a challenge and I wanted to go after something more exciting, but mostly I just wanted out of the car. I hate those things. Huge violently colored grandma cars. Except that they weren’t cars the same way that the faces of the low men weren’t really faces. The things creeped me out.

But we made our circuit of the block, making sure that nothing looked off. We’d been lured into an ambush by some ka-tet from the Tet Corporation (real imaginative name, there) before and had to shoot our way out. Lex was too smart to get caught by something like that again.

“Do you feel it, James?” Lex asked me. Even though the question came out of the blue, I knew what he was talking about. There was something in the air, but also inside. I don’t have the words to describe the feeling of impending doom that was rising around us like a fog, but Lex did.

“Ka-shume. There’s going to be death today, James. Today our ‘tet breaks.” He sounded very sad, but resigned. That’s how he treated anything that began with ka, with resignation and acceptance, whatever ka was doing. He looked at me with and blinked her large green eyes slowly. They narrowed to slits like black slashes in the jade iris. “I hope it’s not you, friend.”

I gave him a smile, if only to make my friend feel better. “Don’t worry.” But I was worried. This feeling was unstoppable. Rolling around the house to check for traps or dangers wasn’t going to make it go away. For the first time I really felt the inevitability of ka.

We pulled up in front of the house after circling the block and piled out of the car. The low men were actually sniffing like they caught a scent. Right in front of the house was a hopscotch court with chalked stars and comets all around it. On the number 5 was a painted rock. Fuck me, the kid’d actually been playing on the court right here.

We went in, expecting trouble and taking it slowly, carefully. When we picked up kids, Lex could just hypnotize them like a vegas act. He flipped a coin between his fingers faster and faster and you could just see their eyes glaze over like I’d gotten my fangs into them. He even showed me the trick and I’d done it a few times. They always came quietly. Adults were a little harder, maybe just because half of them don’t believe in hypnosis. But if they won’t watch the dancing coin, Lex can still get into their heads. He’s too good a progger. I was hopping it wouldn’t come to shooting today.

The door wasn’t locked (nice bright Saturday afternoon like this, who would lock their door?) so we just strolled right in. The girl’s mother comes into the hall first and Lex takes off his hat and catches her mind with those big jade eyes. “Who is it, honey?” we hear from deeper in the house. “Honey?” When her father comes in, Lex pins him with his stare like a butterfly to corkboard. They just stand there like department store mannequins.

We brush by them and move into the house, looking for the girl. I’m glad she’s not in the kitchen. Telekinetics and cutlery are not a good combination. Her bedroom door is open (Penny painted on the wood with each letter a different color), and I see her sitting on the floor, playing. The low men step inside to grab her – it’s just easier to hypnotize someone when they’re sitting still and if we got a hold of her it’d be harder for her to fling shit at us. I was beginning to think that good ole ka was wrong this time.

But she wasn’t a telekinetic. She gasps in surprise when she sees strange men pushing into her room and she can probably feel us. How wrong we are. She screamed and it must have snapped her parents out of Lex’s hold. We heard them shouting and running towards us and then the vampires turned and opened fire. The close-range blasts dimmed my hearing and the gunsmoke stung my eyes.

Penny screamed again, but when the low men lunged for the girl, she just…wasn’t there.

“Shit! She’s a teleporter.” Lex’s smooth voice was low and he belted out the words rapidly, the way he sounds when we’re under fire and it’s going to be a tough one. “We’re not taking this one back. Find the girl. I managed to prog her and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She can’t have gone far.” Lex started pushing everyone out of the room, shoving us in different directions to look for her. “Find the girl and kill her!”

I took off running through the back door and turned left, splitting off from the pack. I’d shot people before. Just like Sayre said I turned out to be good at the real “Kill.” And I knew that we had to kill this little kid. I picked up enough from Lex’s mind to get an idea about the kind of destruction a teleporter could wreak. No way this one was going back to Blue Haven and no way was the Tet Corporation getting their hands on her.

I saw her at the corner of the back yard, slipping through the fence where she’d pushed a plank out of the way. I dashed after her pulling out my sawed off and my Thompson. Jeeze the kid couldn’t be more than ten years old and I pulled out enough iron to take on a swat team. The rest of the pack was right behind her, one of the low men and the other little vampires. A hard kick to the fence damn near knocked it over and they crashed through.

I was right behind them, ripping my expensive coat on the jagged wood. I saw the girl trip and go down and a bright splash of blood, the only bright color in the whole world. She’d skinned her knee when she fell. My ka-mates caught up to her and closed around her. She looked up, her lower lip trembling and tears drawing silvery lines down her cheeks, but she was done crying.

I wouldn’t hear the expression until later, but I felt it at that moment when they were about to kill her. I’d forgotten the face of my father. He never went far, no he was no success story. But he always dressed his best, always did his best. And he taught me the same. I was his success story. So what had I done with everything he’d given me? I’d become a blood-drinking monster a kidnapper and a child-killer.

I couldn’t change the fact of what I’d become. There’s no cure for vampirism. But I did have a choice about the rest. I lifted my Thompson and held down the trigger, raking it back and forth across the yard over Penny’s head.

They went down, shot in the back. The one in the yellow coat grunted and pitched forward, coming within inches of falling right on top of Penny. The vampires just disappeared out of their clothes like smoke. I could actually see the late afternoon sunlight through the holes in their shirts before they crumpled to the ground.

The girl had clapped her hands over her ears and for a second I felt sorry for her. She was being chased by monsters, her parents were dead, and her ears must be screaming in pain. She slowly lifted her head and looked at me. It broke my heart, but it reminded me that even after ten years of riding the lost highways and kidnapping psychics that at least I still had one.

When she started to get up I motioned for her to stay put and I went to the fence. I stood next to the splintered gap where we’d burst in on the neighbors yard (damned good thing they weren’t home) and waited. A second later I heard running footsteps and I caught the other low man as he came through the fence. I punched him in the gut with my sawed off and blew both barrels, and his guts, out his ass.

I waited a while longer, knowing that Lex was still out there, and that’d I’d betrayed him. Chances are that Penny was still going to die and I was going to die with her. But Lex didn’t come running through like the rest of my ka-tet had. No, he was too smart for that. I backed away from the fence, and slipped another pair of shells into the breach of the scatter gun.

I turned and motioned Penny to come over. To my surprise she leapt up and ran towards me, throwing her arms around my hips and pressing her face into my belly. Her tears soaked right through my shirt and I could feel them on my skin, hot and wet like blood. I picked her up and she wrapped her arms around my neck, burying her face against my shoulder like the kitten the posters called her. What the hell was I doing?

I kicked in the neighbors back door and carried Penny through a laundry room and into a kitchen. Lex was waiting there.

“James.” He just said my name, but there was real pain in his voice. I felt it too. We were real friends and we’d betrayed each other. And we both felt ka-shume still hovering around us, still turning ka’s wheel towards death.

I snapped up my Thompson in one hand, turning to the left to put my body in-between Penny and Lex’s return fire. He went for the berretta under his arm and we both fired. Lex’s shot went through my arm and I wanted to fall back from the pain, to get behind better cover than the little kitchen island between us. But I owed Lex this much. I owed him a finish. I held down the trigger and watched my rounds punched little red holes in his clean white shirt, making his body jump and dance like a puppet worked by a guy with Parkinson’s. He hit the fridge and slid down slowly, dragging down magnets and coupons and crayon drawings and leaving a trail of brilliant scarlet.

I lowered my speed-shooter and panted, my ears still ringing from the gunfire. The pain began to seep in through the adrenalin and my fingers let my gun slip out of their grasp. I turned my head to Penny, who was clinging to me and nearly choking me.

“Penny? Penny? Let go. Let go darling, just for a second.” She looked up at me, her eyes red-rimmed but mostly dry now and gave me a very reasonable nod. I set her down and walked around the island and looked down at Lex, curled up on his side in a pool of blood.

I kneeled down next to the friend I killed and rolled him over onto his back. He laid there for a few moments, then his green eyes shot open and he gasped. Blood spattered from his mouth and stuck in his whiskers. He reached up almost slowly towards me, and I leaned closer in case he could still speak. I had to hear his last words, even if he used them to curse me. It would be no more than I deserved.

He put his soft-furred fingers against my face and then he dragged them down. I felt his claws extend and then rip into my cheek and chin. I jerked my hand towards my shotgun, but his hand was falling limply to the floor. Hot pain stung my eye and lip where he’s slashed me.

“James…” I leaned closer to hear him, even after what he’d just done. “You always were more like a Gunslinger than a Regulator. It’s okay to respect an enemy…” He lapped some blood from his mouth with a tongue already coated in blood. “My claws… not an attack…. A lesson…. If you would be a gunslinger, then learn…well. Never approach an enemy like this unless you…are sure he cannot...harm you.”

“I’m sorry, Lex,” I said.

He blinked his jade green eyes for the last time and made a pitiful mewing noise. “Ka,” was all he said.

I picked up Penny again and went to the garage. Keys were hanging from a little wooden plaque shaped like a large key and I found the one that started the SUV inside. I stopped a few blocks away, just far enough to be clear of the police and just sat there with my hands on the wheel, trying not to shake.

Penny was quiet for a while, then she asked me, “What’s your name?”

The left side of my face was numb but for the pain. “James. James Cain.”

Penny scooted closer on the bench seat. She reached into my jacket and pulled out my handkerchief. She shook it out and then folded it so she could use the part of it with the least blood on it.

“My name is Penny White. You saved my life.” She started dabbing at the slashes on my face with a corner of the kerchief.

“Yeah… I guess so,” I mumbled. I sat there and let her clean the blood out of the deep scratches. We probably should have been worrying about the bullet in my arm, but Penny went on cleaning my face, maybe it was what she thought she was supposed to do. When I cried she patted away the tears too.

“Ka,” I told her.

Top Hat Cats

If they’d just turned me into a vampire and let me go, I probably would have killed myself. I was no less repulsed by Sayre and his cronies now that I’d joined them than I was before. Being one of them just made things worse. Most little vampires are just out there, drinking blood and going about their business. Not that the Crimson King doesn’t have use for them, but he doesn’t call on them until they’re needed.

Sayre decided I could be more useful. “I know that you pride yourself on being an expert in ‘the Kill.’” He cracked a demon’s smile. “If indeed you are, then you might prove yourself useful.” I wanted to go back to New York, to wake up in my penthouse next to whatever dumb blonde I’d brought home last night and have it all be a nightmare. But when the men in yellow coats hauled me to my feet and the vampire with my blood smeared over his chin patted me on the shoulder, I knew that was all gone. I screamed until someone hit me over the back of my head with a gun barrel.

The next day (at that point I was surprised to see the sun and for a second I thought that maybe it meant last night had never happened), I was flown back to New York in the company of some low men and handed over to Lex Z’aal and his Regulators. I didn’t know what to expect when I was ushered into a place called the Dixie Pig. My skin crawled when I saw that it was full of men and women like the guys in yellow coats; too tall or too fat, with red photo-flash eyes wearing violently clashing colors. I just about threw up when I turned my head and saw that the skin of the man next to me actually was crawling. When he looked at me, his face sort of slid a little behind the turn like it wasn’t properly attached to the skull beneath, but just loosely draped over it.

A hand clapped me on the shoulder in a comradely fashion. It was strong but gentle, steering me away from the loud chatter and the haze of cigarette smoke. “Here, sit down. I know it’s all bit much at once, isn’t it?” The voice was smooth and clam, as reassuring as the arm around me. “Have a drink.”

I slumped into a dimly lit booth in the back of the room and shakily took the glass of whiskey that slid in front of me. I gulped it down quickly, only beginning to wonder if I could even drink alcohol now that I’d been changed. In the next second I only wished for another glass.

Seated in the booth across from me was…something. My first thought was to call it a man. It seemed to have a head, two arms and two legs, and in my mind a human being was the only thing that really fit that description. But there was no mistaking it for a human. I only lacked the term to describe what it was. Though he wore a white shirt and tie and I could see a gold watch around the left wrist and even a flash of gold at his left ear, the thing was as much cat as man. He was covered in short gray fur like the cats called Russian Blues, with pointed ears and whiskers and jade green eyes and everything.

“The whiskey helps, I know.” It smiled, showing off needle-sharp fangs. But the voice was the one that’d comforted me, the one who took me away from the noise and the raucous laughing of the people who’s faces weren’t really faces. “The can’toi, of course, don’t really go through this, but some of the vampires do. When they’re new.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I had to spit the words out past lips and tongue that didn’t want to work.

“Lex Z’aal.” He smiled again and extended a hand. Protruding from a very normal shirt sleeve was a gray-furred hand with little pointed nails at the fingertips. His voice and the gesture was so normal that I reached out instinctively, seeking comfort in the familiarity of the ritual greeting if nothing else. The fur on his hand was very soft, but his palm was covered by a soft, leathery pad. “Sayre wants you put to use and he’s given you to me. Forgive me, but I’ve progged you a little and I see a lot of potential.”

Lex got me through it. Through the blood drinking and the low men and everything. He was something called a taheen, some ancient race from… well before. Maybe before humans, I don’t know. What he called can’toi, most everyone else called low men, or Regulators for their work for the Crimson King. That’s our boss. The great royal red dude behind it all. Behind the Sombra Corporation. Thinking back to when I was plotting their takeover I realize just what a fool I was.

I became one of Lex’s ka-tet, which he explained was a sort of circle of people bound together by ka, which sounds like a raven’s cry, but means fate or something. Lex and me and two other vampires and two low men. He took me to this tattoo shop after a few weeks and while the low men went across the street to the butcher shop I was inked with Lex’s sign. A little black top hat on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger on my right hand. “The sigul of our ka-tet, the Top Hat Cats,” he told me. The low men came in unwrapping the white butcher paper to munch on the raw meat and I just pulled my white gloves back on.

So what we did for Sombra and the Crimson King was track down special people. Psychics. Funny how even after I was turned into a vampire and given a job alongside things that wear human-suits and a man with the head of a cat that I could still scoff at psychics. We tracked them down and grabbed them and took them back to the Dixie Pig or sometimes another place where we’d hand them off to some more low men to be taken away. Yeah, I’d become a professional kidnapper.

Some of the time it was easy. They never knew we were hunting them, never saw us coming. But these are psychics we’re talking about, and sometimes they’d see us coming and run. Some would even fight. Bad idea.

The first thing Lex did when I became part of his ‘tet was give me guns. We weren’t supposed to kill the people we were after, but we could kneecap them if we had to, and more than once we had to gun down people in our way. I asked Lex why the King wanted these people once. He was quiet for a long time, but he was just thinking. We’d stay up late most nights with a couple of beers, talking. Sometimes politics or sports and sometimes he’d answer questions about taheen or other weird shit. This was the look he got whenever I asked him something really tough or maybe that most people weren’t supposed to know. But I liked Lex, and he liked me – he always said that most vampires weren’t worth talking to and low men were uncouth plebeians.

“There’s a Tower, James. At the very heart of everything. Everything. All of existence, in every world. It holds it all together and the universes spin around it.” He licked his paw-hand and smoothed his whiskers. “Some say that in the very top room of the Tower, sits God. The Crimson King wants to climb to the top of the Tower and gain entrance to the room at the top.”

I felt like he wasn’t telling me the whole truth, but most of our talks like this were sort of like that. There was a lot to know about the world(s), and a lot of it I wasn’t ready for. I tossed him another beer and we changed subjects.

Chasing these psychics was challenging, and I have to admit, fun. I never lost my taste for striving against a worthy opponent. But it wasn’t big business I was hunting anymore. I was hunting big game now.

And it was a fucking adventure. There are highways in hiding throughout America. Probably all over the world for all I know. You can tell when they’re close by the litter of empty Dixie cups and the tattered remains of newspapers blowing around empty parking lots like lost souls. They look just like normal roads, but they never lead to the same place. Sometimes Co-Op city is in Brooklyn and sometimes it’s in the Bronx…

When we get close to finding our prey, the low men put out the signs. They like to leave marks, for whatever reason. I’ll never get why some things make them laugh. Hopscotch courts chalked on the sidewalk, with little stars and moons and comets drawn all around them. That kind of shit. And when we start getting close, they use pet posters. Still with the little stars and moons, but with a name and description of a pet that sounds a lot like the person we’re after. And always with a big reward offered.

Here’s where the vampires make themselves useful. If they get wind of someone we’re looking for, they call and turn us onto them. Hell, we’ve even got calls from some normal folk who figure it out and hope to cash in on the big reward.

LOST! SIAMESE CAT, 2 YRS OLD

ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF RUTA

SHE IS NOISY BUT FULL OF FUN

LARGE REWARD OFFERED

$ $ $ $ $ $

DIAL 764, WAIT FOR BEEP, GIVE YOUR NUMBER

GOD BLESS YOU FOR HELPING

Well, her name was Rita and she was Hmong, not Siamese, but they were close. Close enough. She didn’t look too full of fun when we caught up to her, but she was loud. She screamed and threw bricks with her mind. Damn near took my head off. Lex gave me a Thompson, the kind with the big drum clips like in Sacrface, so I pointed it at the sky and let off a couple dozen rounds. Rita was loud, but I was louder. We looked at each other and we both knew that I’d shoot her.

She was more of a challenge than those two numbnuts in Queens. A Pair of losers that’d been bought by some of the King’s good men to do a job that they’d fucked up. Well when you fuck up in the employ of this guy, your face ends up on a missing persons poster. Or more like a lost pet poster.

There’s a little one with bad acne and a big one with an out-of-style mustache. The little one is loud mouthed and stupid, the big one is quieter and smarter. But not by much. Still, enough to know that they are in serious shit when we show up. Guys like them think they’re tough, but they fall apart all the worse when they come face to face with a real hardcase.

I chopped them both down with a rattle of thunder and Lex burned their faces and hands with acid so they couldn’t be identified. I didn’t care if they were, no one would connect it to us. We didn’t exist.

What I wanted was a real challenge. There was this guy, Ted Brautigan. He’d been taken by the Low Men, but he’s actually escaped. And not just once… Everywhere we went I was looking for a lost dog named Teddy, or a missing cat called Brattigan. A real challenge.

What we found was something else entirely. Something that would change my life more profoundly than anything since that night in Nassau when all the color went away…

LOST KITTEN! 8 WKS OLD

WILL ANSWER TO PENNY

SHE IS SWEET AND PLAYFUL, BUT HEADSTRONG

LARGE REWARD OFFERED

$ $ $ $ $ $

DIAL 919, LEAVE YOUR NUMBER AT THE BEEP

BLESS YOU

Blood Junkies

Forget that Anne Rice bullshit, there’s nothing romantic about being a vampire. Everything changed that day in Nassau when the vampire bit me and made me like him. It changed how I saw the world.

I was like most people in most of the worlds, having no idea that there were vampires, or a Crimson King, or low men, or a Dark Tower at the center of it all. Even as the colors died I found I could see more.

Not that being able to see the dark blue aura that clings to me and my kind like a living shroud is anything anyone would want to see. Or the smell of hot metal and charred onions that cling to the low men. And especially not the chimes that are always ringing just out of hearing range, but which float almost into perception when you least expect it. Like the fucking mission bells in Hotel California.

The only thing in the world that stands out is blood. As bright and as fragrant as a rose garden used to be. I can almost see it through the skin, beating just under the surface at the throat… It’s become my world. It’s not like I’m really undead or something. I don’t know, I barely understand it. But I can and do eat food, and if I don’t, I get hungry just like I used to. But it’s blood that I really need.

Let me clear up some other Dracula-myth bullshit. No one’s ever chased me away with a cross, though I’ll admit that no one’s tried yet. I haven’t been in a church for a long time either (way before I was turned into a vampire), but seeing crosses doesn’t freak me out. Sunlight doesn’t make me burst into flames or anything. I don’t have to sleep when the sun rises and I don’t sleep in a coffin. Get over it.

If you meet me, you’ll never know what I am or who I am. Even if you’re my prey. Drinking blood is… it’s like a drug. When I get my fangs into you the blood is all I can think about. The hot, metallic taste dribbling down my throat. I don’t know what my victims are thinking, but no one’s ever fought back. They just lay there until I’ve had my fill. I’ve watched the puncture wounds heal up within seconds and then after a minute or two, people sort of snap out of it. Go on with business as usual like I hadn’t just bit holes in their neck and licked the blood up as they bled.

But we know. Once someone’s been bitten it marks them. That dark blue shroud sort of rubs off on them, leaving just a trace around their neck. And they go down easier too, like they’re used to it. They just tilt their head back and they’re already gone into that blissful trance or wherever they go before I’ve even pierced their skin.

I wish I could say that it’s some kind of glorious high. Yeah, when I drink the blood is my world, but it’s still blood. There’s no amnesia for me, nothing to make me forget that I’m drinking someone’s blood, that I’m a parasite squirming through the shadows in-between worlds.

Being a vampire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man

I sat on the edge of the narrow bed alone. The room they gave to me was nice enough. Small. Not spartan, but certainly spare. Like a little motel room, really. Right down to the bible in the drawer and a little picture frame on the wall. It was crooked again, but for once I didn't get up to straigten it.

I opened my mouth wide, feeling my lips slide over the points of my teeth. I pushed the thick double-barrels of the sawed off in my mouth slowly, careful not to bang the cold metal against my teeth. I felt the steel hit the roof of my mouth and I pressed harder, jamming the bore into my palate hard. I wanted to make sure that both barrels went right through my brain. Have to do it right.

I've always been good at "The Kill."

***

My father never went very far, never had a college education. But then, in his generation, you didn't need more than a high school diploma to get a decent job and so long as you weren't a woman you could rise as high as you reached. Well, so long as you had talent.

My father didn't have it. But he never stopped reaching, and that's what he taught me. He also taught me to "dress for success." He went to work every day wearing a suit and tie, hair slicked back no matter how thin it got. First impressions are all important. Image is everything. And of course "dress to kill." In every way I surpased my father.

The nineteen eighties was a good time for guys like me. The sharks, the professional predators. Buy, sell, trade, it was what we did. I didn't care that the hostile takeover from last week cost a hundred thousand jobs. I didn't think about the lives it changed or even ended. Hell, I didn't even think about the money.

It was all about the kill. Some guys go big game hunting, me, I hunted big business. And I was good at it. We didn't even have cell phones. Instead of stuffed heads on my walls, you could have decorated my office out of the pages of Forbes or Fortune 500, and I'd have given you a million dollars (and I mean nineteen-eighties dollars, not the watered down greenbacks circling the drain in the economy right now), if you could find so much as an inch of uncovered wall.

Yeah, I was good. Maybe that's even what got me killed. Like in the old west, if a gunslinger made a name for himself, it wouldn't be long before the next up-and-comer would be along, hoping to gun you down and earn glory by being the one who shot so-and-so. Once that was me, gunning for the biggest dogs, the most exclusive stock. Then it was my turn.

At first, I thought it was funny when I realized that my current holding company had been targeted for takeover. I was so used to being on the offensive that the novelty of being in my prey's place excited me. The excitement of the chase, the thrill of the challenge to turn the tables. I greeted it eagerly.

There wasn't much to find out about my ooponent. The name was Sombra. A closed corporation that mostly bought other companies. Just like me. They specialized in a lot of new technology, real estate and construction, and were based out of Nassau, the Bahamas. Oooh, I couldn't wait to own those offices. They affiliated a few other companies, North Central Positronics and Lamerk Industries, and I considered buying them up and leaving Sombra standing alone before knocking them down, but in the end I decided against it. It felt...personal. Like this was between me and Sombra. I had no idea how personal it would get.

I became obsessed, especially as the months went on and I couldn't get out of Sombra's shadow. Everywhere I turned, they were right on top of me, hemming me with lawyers and contracts and offers. Rather than get discouraged, I fought harder. I was getting maybe four hours of sleep a night, half the time just staying the night at the office. Coccaine and caffine kept me going. And the challenge. They hadn't bought me yet.

I fended them off for almost a year when their financial assaults eased up. I thought Sombra had given up. I was already planning my revenge, when I got the phone call. One Richard P. Sayre. I was invited to Nassau to meet with him. How could I pass that up? It was like getting the chance to meet a chess master you've only played with by mail.

The offices in the Bahamas were everything I thought they would be and only made me hungrier. I walked into Sayre's office like I already owned the building and full of plans to take his receptionist back to my hotel with me on the way out. But Sayre's grin wipes mine off my face. He's maybe sixty, but a young sixty. Or an old thirty, take your pick. He worea suit that probably cost as much as everything in my closet put together, but his shirt was an eye-straining yellow that only made his red tie look even more garish. His gray hair was swept back from a lean, predatory face and on his forehead was... I don't know. But I know what it looked like. It was a hole, like he was shot through the head, but he was still alive. Bleeding, but never dripping.

The door slammed shut behind me, less like the ominous clang of a portculis dropping in a dracula movie (though I'd have plenty of reasons to think of those soon enough), and more like the rapid bang of a door thorn shut in a heated argument. Three men had come into the room behind me. Two were wearing long, floor-sweeping coats in mustard yellow, one with a purple fedora pulled down low over his eyes, the other with a lime green bowler tilted too far to one side. The third man was wearing slacks and a hawaiian shirt; loud, but mercifully dull compared to the other two.

"I do hope you've enjoyed our little game, Sai Cain," said Sayre, causing me to whirl around again. "I certainly have. You were more of a challenge than I expected, but in every game there comes a time when it must end and a winner and a looser must be decided. And I, Sai Cain, am never the looser."

I was out of my depth here, well beyond the scope of any negotiation I'd ever been in before. A shark yes, but a shark out of water.

"However, as I have been amused by you, so has a certain giggling friend of mine. You may meet him in time, but if I were I'd pray that you don't He darkles... He tincts..." I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but I agreed that I didn't want to know. My blood froze in my veins. "He made quite an interesting little suggestion for what to do with you. You're about to learn what it really means to suffer a hostile takeover."

The term falls well short of describing it. The man in the hawaiian shirt leapt onto my back like the heroes do in movies when they're fighting ogres. Even wrapped his legs around me. We went down in a thrashing tangle of limbs, though that didn't last long. When he bit me it was the worst pain I had ever experienced, the worst pain I had ever imagined. But then, it went away. The pain. Everything.

He didn't just drain me of blood. He drained the world of it. Like the whole world was a television set with the color turned down. It was almost there, almost bright enough to see, but only almost. Maybe that's why the low men wear the clothes they do.

But not me. No yellow coats, no fopish hats. If you want to dress to kill, you dress sharp.

***

There's a knock at the door. Even before I heard the voice, I knew who it was. The rapping (as if someone gently tapping) was light and fast, very polite. And it comes from about the level of the doorknob.

"James?" she calls. I take the gun out of my mouth. I can't let her see me like this. The door handle twists in her small hands and the door begins to open. I slid the sawed-off under the pillow quickly and put my hands on my knees. I could still taste steel and gunpowder in my mouth.

"Hi, James!" She smiled. Dark hair, dark eyes twinkling. She only smiled like that for me. Why? "I made sandwhiches!" She shows me the paper plate with two sandwhiches on it. Peanut butter and jelly of course, on white bread with the crust cut off. She put the sandwhiches on the bed, then jumped up to sit next to me, hip to hip, with her little feet swinging above the carpet.

I tried to blink back the tears but one got past me. She saw it and put one of her small hands over mine. She was telling me that it's okay with that touch. Everything's going to be okay. More tears came after the first, but I picked up the sandwhich she offered. It was good.