Second leftover: the Egg of Monsters

I wrote this for an anthology but I couldn't get it long enough for the anthology. It's kind of a specialized topic (superheroes and vampires) so I dunno what to do with it. So here.

The Egg of Monsters

I was dodging to the next row of graves in the cemetery—you know, to avoid being killed—when the growling stopped me.

It was unusual: Our city isn’t exactly in a wolf zone. I squinted in the darkness for the source of the sound.

A poodle. Not a frou-frou show dog but a bedraggled feral beast as tall as my ribs. It was flanked by a hound-y looking mutt and a burr-knotted spaniel.

Feral dogs were additional lethality and not the monsters I was running from. Still, I took a step backward.

There was a chorus of growls behind me.

Surrounded.

What do we pay dog catchers for?

# # #

Rent and dog food are ridiculously recurrent expenses, and I needed money. I also needed money for Slobberkin's shots, which I was sure were going to hurt me more than they hurt him. So I found a job to do.

This job required me to meet someone who was going to probe my mind and figure out if I could be trusted to do the job.

I know, secret ID and all of that. But (a) it's the supervillain equivalent of “I know a guy,” and (b) I hoped being trusted would translate into future work, and (c) I needed the cash. My last job had netted me a friend but those don’t have a cash value.

This guy—call him Mr. Verity because that was his trade name—looked like TV idea of a lawyer: handsome, shaved head, mocha skin, nice tie. He told me he was a truth-teller, not a full-blown telepath. “Folks wouldn't trust me if I were a telepath. Too many secrets.” He had a practised smile that didn't reach his eyes. He had a form for me (I signed as “The Mynah,” duh).

“May I hold your hand?” My look said everything. “I have to touch you to know if you are telling the truth.”

A control lie (“I love clothes shopping”) and then he asked me questions. Yes, I was the Mynah; no, I didn’t work for a government agency; I intended to turn the item over instead of extorting money; I had no interest in controlling the world. Yadda yadda yadda.

The job: theft. A one-percenter stored the results of his improbable hobby in a ridiculously well-secured storage facility. Another one-percenter wanted one of those items but it was, by definition, unique. (His hobby was acquiring nique items.) I was to steal it.

“It” was the Egg of the Moors, the Egg of Demons, the Mother of Troubles, Pandora's Egg, et boring cetera. More bronze than gold, about the size of a goose egg, lots of mystical writing, a crystal lens at each end. There was lore about it as there is about all things with squiggly writing and uncertain provenance. In a few days, it was going to travel on permanent loan to the Vatican.

The tight timeline caused me concern, but the previous contractor had suffered an accident of the incarceration kind. The groundwork had been laid, however, so the night after I met Mr. Verity, I was hiding in the aforementioned storage facility. Don't knock invisibility—even my crappy kind.

I did not wait for the Egg to be moved. I wanted the Egg measured and photographed and verified and if possible in the case, but I didn't want to be so late someone else would have already taken it.

Sound thinking, and I was just waiting for certain guards to go off shift.

Discovery One: God had rolled on the Wandering Monster Table.

# # #

A pale impulsive wacko with no regard for schedules, bullets, or tasers walks into the room and picks up the carrying case.

I should have written the job off, quit, found something else. I didn't. I can sweet-talk my landlord, but not my dog.

Before I can act, a man and a woman charge in. Identical black suits say ”Agency dress code,” but the woman holds a one-hand crossbow, the man a fancy gun. No agency I know.

“Freeze!”

“Doctor Tavor, stop and put down the case!”

The impulsive wacko—apparently “Tavor” and I bet a doctor of the "mad" type—pauses to monologue. “Respect, fool! You address Dracula, Lord of the Vampires!”

This outlandish claim makes me stifle a giggle despite the situation. He's wearing jeans and a plaid shirt with pearl buttons. Can any non-nudist be less Dracula?

The female agent fires her crossbow; un-Dracula catches the bolt and tosses it aside. The male agent fires the gun. It's a squirt gun. The wacko dodges all but a drop on his free hand. The drop sizzles and smokes like acid.

Wacko snarls, crosses the distance in two gargantuan steps and breaks the man’s neck. She has reloaded but he catches the next crossbow bolt, grabs her. He buries his mouth in her neck and then throws her away.

He leaves with the Relic and the case.

Do I follow him or help her?

# # #

Still no guards. Clearly been dealt with. I un-hid and checked the agents.

He was dead; she was not. She had a ragged bite mark on her neck—not a neat pair of holes, but two ragged semicircles that oozed blood in a half-dozen places.

She opened her eyes and tried to slug me, but her punch was weak as a puppy’s head butt.

“Easy,” I said. “I’m Mynah.”

“Never heard of you.” She forced herself to a sitting position and checked her partner. I saw her sag. “Shit. Log: Lindsay—Agent Walden is dead by Dr. Tavor. Looking for help because I’m compromised.”

She shuddered and pulled herself together, then looked at my costume and me. “Super? I need your help. Here’s the situation: That guy thinks he’s a vampire. Green-class super.” Colours of the rainbow: red was highest, violet was lowest.

“But the weaknesses, too. I guess the squirt gun was holy water?”

She nodded. “Somewhere Tavor got the idea that he’s Dracula in an underpowered form, and the Relic will juice him up.” She pulled a first aid kit from her purse, fumbled out the antibiotic spray for me. “My neck?”

I spritzed her. “But?”

“The Relic is the prison for the real Dracula. Like, the I-vant-to-suck-your-blood Dracula.” She felt the edge of the wound, ignored the first aid kit bandages, and started wrapping cotton gauze around her throat.

“How do you know?”

“I saw him go in. Lindsay did it. Drac bit me, there’s a whole thing you’re not cleared to hear, end result is I can’t touch the Relic. Lindsay was supposed to but…well. Poor Lindsay.”

I didn’t say anything.

She looks at me with mildly unfocused eyes. “Can you imagine if Dracula gets out?” And she shivers.

“I don't fight vampires. I steal things.”

“I knit, but that’s not the talent we need right now. Tavor, he can’t infect others. Dracula gets out and suddenly we have vampires. An epidemic. Pandemic.” She shook her head. "I should have taken the transfer to meme division, but those guys are just too weird."

“What are you? FBI? Vatican?”

She showed me an ID. It said Nora Stern, CDC. For all I knew, the CDC logo was legit. “We deal with magical outbreaks as well as scientific ones.”

“Call your backup.”

“We’re understaffed. You're my backup.” She finished tying off the bandage and cut the excess cloth.

“What’s in it for me?”

“You get to keep stealing safely at night.” She grinned in a pale gallows humor way. “Plus maybe a bite. You like sushi?”

I rolled my eyes and then realized she couldn’t see it under the mask. “Fine, I’ll help.”

She said to the air, “Log: Deputizing the Mynah..

She stopped to murmur rites over poor Agent Walden. She made sure that ambulances were on the way but didn't give him another look.

So Discovery Two: people are not the only kind of monsters.

I # # #

In the car, she unlocked her phone and handed it to me. “He can fly, but not fast. Relic case has a tracker. Give me directions.” She looked at me. “Unless you fly?”

“Violet class super. Non-flying.”

She scowled.

I figured out the display, made the map disappear, put it back. Figured out that the length of the arrow was his speed—a steady fifty klicks. “Where’d he come from?”

“Dracula? Transylvania.”

I know who Dracula is. “Tavor.”

“Usual. Type 2b: Unauthorized experimentation, lab accident. We thought the pseudo-Dracula persona was submerged but someone triggered the psychotic break. Lindsay and I were in the area but not close enough.”

“Tavor just knew it was in this storehouse and not in the displays in the houses in Martha's Vineyard and California?”

“Good question.” She repeated the question for her invisible logging app.

Agent Stern drove like a mad person, so I couldn’t Google (which isn’t the search engine I use, but you knew that, right?). Anyway, I was not at my best strapped inside a hurtling car. There were weird detours and a lot of one-way streets. I was busy holding on.

But I wanted to know things like was Dr. Tavor publicly known? What did the logo for the CDC really look like? Had anyone ever decommissioned the chapel that Dr. Tavor was obviously heading for?

The north side of the city has this huge old necropolis ringed by big apartment buildings. In the middle is this chapel. The necropolis is essentially full (only rich people get buried there now) but the chapel is still there. If I were going to enact the ritual to bring back the lord of the vampires, I'd need formerly-consecrated ground. The chapel was once Catholic but now so non-denominational that Satanists had used it.

I think that would count as formerly-consecrated ground.

I told Stern this.

“Long winding road to get in, though, right?” I agreed. “We get in there, we’re trapped if he’s really going somewhere else. We have to play catch-up.”

“We have to play catch-up anyway. This way we at least have a chance.”

She shook her head. “I’m driving.”

I couldn’t see him ahead of us—it was a crescent moon—but the tracking signal showed him in the necropolis.

We got out halfway up that long and winding road. We stopped the car by a wheelbarrow, got out, and she shot me with a taser.

# # #

I don’t know if you’ve ever been struck by a taser. It hurts for twice forever, and during the part where your whole body is essentially useless? That’s the part where they put zip-ties on your ankles and wrists and dump you like potatoes in the wheelbarrow for the rest of the journey.

Look, she’d been bitten by Dracula. She was the “someone” who had triggered Dr. Tavor’s psychotic break and told him where to go; she was nearby but too late, she didn't pick up the holy squirt gun. However, I figured she’d let me walk to the chapel on my own two feet and I’d have a chance to improvise.

The taser was a surprise.

After she had dumped me into the wheelbarrow, she said conversationally, “The master will be hungry when he is free. If he drains me, I cannot be his bride.”

By the time she got to the chapel I could move again but I was incredibly tired and felt like I had had a cramp over my entire body. And there was Dr. Tavor with a couple of folded sheets of paper.

Well, crap. The ritual, I presumed. Probably printed out from the Internet. Because that’s where I had found it. In fact, I had a folded copy in my pocket. Stern had never looked. I don’t think she was a great agent.

I’m sent to steal a magic item? Of course I research it first, after that little contre-temps with the Albright Amulet. The name “the Egg of Demons” was a hint.

He said, “I am not hungry.”

“For when you come into your full power. Master.”

He shrugged it off but said, “Thoughtful.”

In my research there were two rituals. The magic circle on the ground indicated that they were going to do the releasing ritual; you didn’t need a circle for the capturing ritual.

He directed her on last-minute things while I lay there, apparently helpless.

Remember those powers that Stern didn’t check on? I have three crappy™ super powers: I can mimic sounds, make some people sick, and go invisible-sorta. (I make an ultrasonic noise that people don’t want to look at.)

You might think those were excellent ritual-spoiling powers, and yeah, I could. Once. Then they’d kill me and do the ritual again.

That is, if they could find me.

Snapping pull-ties is painful but easy if you have something like the handle of a wheelbarrow to fit between your bound limbs. Twist and snap.

So deep breath. Hooked my wrists over one handle and twisted, then got my ankles in position.

I started the invisibility sound.

Tavor was clutching his ears. “What is that noise?” he snarled.

“What noise?” asked Stern. She scanned the three hundred degrees of the necropolis I was not in.

I twisted and got my legs free, but twisting tumbled me over and broke the sound. I started it again, but too late.

“The girl!” Tavor said. I shut up and moved quickly. I doubted he could see in the dark and I know she couldn't. I hurdled a headstone and broke left, then ducked low.

“I’ll get her.”

“No—Dracula has need of you. The children of the night shall deal with her.“

# # #

It's not like I was leaving. The car was way down the lane and I had been hired to steal the Relic. I mean, it was right there. If I left, who knew where it would be tomorrow?

That was when I met the dogs.

# # #

The headstones are in rows about two meters apart. Quick dodge to the right, between stones because I feel awful from the tasing…Four more dogs are there and the rest of the pack is chasing and howling. One jumps up for my left arm; I jerk my arm away but it spoils my jump. I crash into a headstone and dogs are all over me.

They are just holding me with their mouths. They don’t all have soft mouths, either, so I know they can rip out chunks of flesh if they want.

Stern gags me and hauls me to my feet, then walks me back to the ritual site at the head of my canine posse.

“Make sure the gag is tight. I do not need interruptions,” Tavor says.

Stern nods.

The table is a cheap fold-out kind from a hardware store.Three shapes are powdered on the ground: The magic circle, complete with sigils; a square, with the table and the Relic clamped near an unlit candle, and a triangle, where Stern dumps me. She doesn’t tie me, because there are the dogs: some inside the triangle, some outside, but none actually on the lines.

Tavor strips off his plaid shirt to show a pale skinny chest and takes a place in the center of the circle. Stern starts chanting, Arabic or Farsi or something. It probably matches the transliteration in my pocket. Between verses or something, she hits a little gong.

I reach up for the gag and without pausing Stern points a gun at me. Of course she has a pistol to go with the crossbow and taser. I pull my hands down without lowering my gag. Instead, I look at where the circle is relative to me and the dogs.

Tavor starts to chant, too. Things are building to a head. She lights the candle.

So I grab a dog and dive for the edge of the circle.

# # #

I figured, if you need a magic circle, the circle part is necessary, like a wheel or a gear; it can’t be a non-circle. When someone dives for the edge and uses a dog (for example) to brush a hole in the circle, it’s not a circle any more, it’s an arc. Between the dogs rushing in to bite me and the one I’d used to wipe with, it was a non-magic arc with some scribbles around it. Shouldn’t work, right?

It did, though; magic is apparently not an exact science. Stern completed the ritual anyway; maybe she couldn’t stop. She lit the candle so the light shone from the big end to the little end of the egg.

And Dracula appeared in the arc, in the pale flesh.

Beside Tavor.

I didn’t see what Dracula was wearing because I was already busy with dogs. Probably something disappointing like a sweat suit.

Life hack: If you time it right, you can do cartwheels all along the diameter of a magic circle, bounce over the brawling vampires in the middle while knocking your gag free, then hit everybody with the illness sound.

Plus side: my crappy™ illness power works much better on dogs than people, so only two of the pack were left standing.

Minus side: the power is crappy™, so it doesn’t work on any kind of brawling vampires. They were also left standing, as well as the two dogs and the angry Stern.

# # #

Angry? Stern is positively apoplectic. She fires off three shots that hit nothing.

The dogs head for Dracula but then both Tavor and Dracula murmur “Attack!” in strained voices. The competing orders make the dogs stand stiff and still.

I go “invisible” and head straight for Stern.

She misses me another six times and she does not run out of bullets.

I think that is not a regulation weapon.

I hit her in the nose. My self-defense instructor had said that might be lethal. I do it wrong; it makes Stern fight fiercer.

Stern is much better at this than I am: she’s taking me apart while holding the Egg. One of her strikes numbs my left arm. I can only keep making the noise for one more shot—I have to breathe!—so I punch at her throat.

She blocks me.

I gasp for air and she can see me.

Stern grins, like someone who has the Raid in hand and has spotted that pesky cockroach.

And then she stops. Over my own pounding heartbeat, I hear faintly, “Come to me.” There’s no mojo in it for me, but Stern, she leaves and stumbles toward…Dracula.

I remember her saying that Dracula would be hungry.

I can’t let her go to him. It’s not decent, let alone that he can beat Tavor while starving so Lord knows what he can do at full strength. I mean, the Egg might not be able to capture him.

Shit. She’s holding the Egg.

My only advantage was that she wasn’t actually trying to fight me, just get to Dracula..

I trip her, and she doesn’t drop it. Dracula is crawling toward us. Dracula is nearly on us. I steal it from her hand. Maybe if I’m fast enough—

I need the candle. I sprint back to the table, and the candle is knocked over, unlit.

Dracula is drinking. I can hear it, big gulps and sucking sounds.

I am so sorry.

Where is the lighter? Where? I can’t see in the dark, and he’ll be done soon—

There. There.

All I can hear is that sound. I did not want that sound. I flipped the Egg of the Demons over so the small end was between the candle and Dracula.

He finishes. He looks at me all red and replete and full. Stern lays there like a rag used to check the car’s oil.

I start speaking even though the words didn’t come with a pronunciation guide.

He looks at me.

His eyes should be awful…but they’re sexy. I want him to bite me. I want him to bite me and Mr. Verity—

I remember the words I was going to say.

I mumble the words.

Dracula dwindles and disappears. The Relic—the Egg—gets as heavy as sin.

# # #

This thing was clearly a threat that belonged at the Vatican or CDC or someplace protected. I had to avoid skin contact with Mr. Verity, hand it over to fulfill the contract, get paid, and then steal it back.

I was afraid to sleep. Those sounds...

At home I planted a second tracking device on the case and then put on headphones and blasted music into my ears.

The next day, I went to the drop-off. I put down the case, took a step back, and waited for Mr. Verity.

“Any problems?”

I told him everything, even though I knew better. I told him about the CDC and Nora Stern's betrayal and Dr. Tavor crying after he snapped out of it. I told him about Dracula and the sounds. I told him about my second tracking device. And then I didn't move. It was like I was frozen in place.

“You can't lie to me, or act against me,” he said. “Precautions...we've never worked together before, and I see I was right to plant the controls.” He picked up the case. “Perhaps I'll tell my employer that you couldn't manage the job. A resale might net me more. I have some acquaintances who might like to weaponize Dracula.”

Is that why I was able to finish the ritual? Because otherwise would have hurt Mr. Verity? In that case...

“You intend to free Dracula?”

“No, of course not.” I felt my body set, like concrete. “But I don't care if the buyer does.” He hefted the carrying case. “Of all people, I’m safe,” he said. “He has to touch me to hurt me.”

If I pointed out the things that Dracula could do — hypnosis, weather control, acting through mentally controlled puppets — he would spend time trying to find ways around it, and maybe get hurt. And he had ensured that I had to keep him safe.

So I sang at him. I sang the song that makes people ill, and in my desperation, I put extra oomph into it.

He suddenly looked queasy. “Stop it,” he said.

I might have faltered. He took advantage of the moment to lunge for me. I guess his powers really did require skin contact. I easily sidestepped him.

Then I kicked him in the head.

Not the throat: I couldn't do permanent damage to him. But I could render him unable to hurt himself. At least, that's what I told myself.

As mothers and dog owners everywhere know, it hurt me more than it hurt him.

At the end of it, though, he was unconscious and I was still standing.

I grabbed the case and collected the reward for returning it to the insurance company.

They kept an eye on me while I handed it back to the original owner for shipping, and I watched it off.

I had to.

I was protecting Mr. Verity.