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
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