
Moreland arrived with five of the Mouras Encantadas while I was texting Charly for the first time since he left for Madagascar with Daphne. I promised myself I’d wait for him to reach out to me, but I couldn’t stand waiting any longer. When there was no response, I tried Daphne. Nothing.
While I was striking out on my texting efforts, Moreland arrived with her Goa entourage, who had taken a flight from Panaji.
The five vampires looked so much alike that they could have been identical quintuplets. “Jade, meet Brilexus, she of the House of Mouras Encantadas,” Moreland said.
Brilexus bowed. I did the same while saying, “Pleasure to meet you.” I wanted to add a comment comparing her beauty to great works of art, but not badly enough to start a knife fight.
“These are my blood sisters,” Brilexus said, pointing her open hand to the left of the four vampires standing behind her. “Brilennia, Bristalia, Brilana, and Brishella.” There was no way I was going to remember those names, especially since they all looked almost exactly alike. Each of them wore long purple and black silk robes with plunging necklines laced with jewels: red and blue diamonds, light green jadeite, emeralds, red beryl, Paraiba tourmaline, taaffeite, and who knows what else. The sash tightening their robes was made of three glittering ropes of twisted silk covered with diamond dust.
Their hair was the blackest color I’d ever seen sprouting from anywhere – thin, long, straight strands fell to their knees in black waterfalls that shimmered even in the dim light of the brothers’ new lab room.
The light wasn’t great in the brothers’ new digs, which was lit by poor lighting worsened by two missing fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling’s fixtures. The brothers magnified the problem by keeping only one of three sets of lights on. That, and a steady rainfall outside, cast a gray hue across the lab, which in turn was accentuated by gray, metal furniture.
Still, the hair of the Mouras Encantadas shimmered like it had been polished. I wondered who washed it. I’ve never seen myself as a servant, but I would have gladly volunteered my services so that I could bury my nose and soapy hands into their sublime black postiche.
Their skin was a dark blue, their irises yellow with deep black grooves. Their long noses extended out of dorsal humps to flare out exquisitely, like a dragon’s. I was nearly incapable of speech. They were, quite simply, works of biological art. They were all taller than me. Eight feet tall, I’d say, if not more, and impossibly identical. I wondered what the flight from Goa was like. There were bound to be a few TikTok videos sprouting up. And a heavy thud in my heart wished Dr. Chua could have lived to see them.
Surprisingly, though, I didn’t recognize Moreland’s recruits from my earlier visit to Goa. I mentioned that visit to Brilexus, who smiled, then walked up to me and ran her finger, with its long yellow fingernail, under my chin. “You’re something of a legend in Goa,” she said in a deep, guttural, but alarmingly sultry voice.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Shh, nothing to be concerned with,” she whispered. The back of her fingernail gently scraped my cheek. Much more of this and I was going to just have to go ahead and demand a knife fight. I looked at Bennie and Philip, who had been sitting at a large metal table tinkering with computers. Their open mouths looked like tunnel entrances. Bennie was holding a tiny screwdriver in midair while he watched. Philip had dropped his phone onto the table.
“Well, then,” I said. “Tell me of my legends.”
“No. Not now,” she said.
“A crass one, that,” said one of the Bris, glaring at me.
Brilexus smiled and said, “Yesssssssssssssssss. A bit ruuuuuuuuuude.” Her voice was becoming engagingly familiar. I had heard it before. I wanted more.
“I think you looked a bit differently than you do now,” I suggested.
“Obnoxious, even,” said another Bri.
“Yes, he made quite a name for himself in a very short time,” another said.
“I was going through some stuff,” I said.
“He always says that,” said Moreland.
“Oh, come on!” I said. “Don’t you ladies understand the importance of procreation?”
The five vampires laughed in unison so shrilly and loudly that some glassware on one of the nephews’ tables shattered. The unified laugh spawned an echo that seemed to last several minutes beyond the initial blast.
“Fine,” I said. “But it is not normal to be that seductive and then not expect a reaction.”
“A reaction!” said the echo in five synchronized voices, without the high-pitched thrill this time. “We are not yours to do with as you please. The only reaction toward anything we do should be absolute, unequivocal respect.”
Then, Brilexus said by herself in a soft, cooing voice, “Can you give us that, child?”
Talk about being put in your place. I nodded. I wanted to save the world more than I wanted to try for a concubine of catty Goa vampires. “I can,” I reiterated. “And I’m honored that you’d consider offering your assistance.”
“Don’t be,” cooed Brilexus by herself. All five said in their unified echo, “We are here because Moreland of the Obayifo House, the grandest house of the West, has requested our assistance. It is no more complex, nor simple, than that.”
“Got it,” I said. “Consider me an inconsequential party to all this,” I said sarcastically.
“Correct,” said the echo. I could have sworn I saw Philip snicker.
“Come with me,” said Moreland to the five Bris. “I’ll give you more details on what it is we are dealing with.”
The five bowed together in my direction, then Moreland led them out of the lab.
“Dude,” said Philip after they left, “They’re so not into you.”
Bennie laughed and said, “I bet they’d rather take a wooden stake to the heart than have sex with Jade.” The two of them thought that was pretty funny. I glared. Bennie said, “Sorry,” and resumed his tinkering.
I wondered if the five Bris were expecting music after that exchange. I wasn’t much inclined to provide it if they were.
“Don’t you sort of have a girlfriend?” asked Bennie.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“That’s like, a checkbox on some dating apps,” said Philip. “It’s complicated. Which means, I just want to fuck people until somebody tells me I have to stop.”
“Uncle would not like that language,” said Bennie.
“Yeah, sorry,” said Philip. Philip looked at me. He was quiet while he tapped several things into his laptop. I looked at grim news stories on the internet. After several minutes of awkward room silence other than the hum of fluorescent lights, he said, “I think I’m mad.”
“At me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Philip. Bennie put his small screwdriver down to listen more intently.
“I am, too,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve made one right decision since this all started.” I sat down and looked at the floor. Then I looked at Philip. “I think it’s been more than a century since I’ve made what I call a good decision about anything.”
“All we can do is try, I guess,” Philip said while tapping a few things into his computer.
“Tell me, though. What’s going on?” I asked.
“Maybe,” thought Philip out loud after waiting a beat, “I’m just mad about random chance. That moment you appeared in front of us. At first, the adventure seemed fun, but then it wasn’t.” He sounded so sad when he said the last part that I wanted to hug him, but this wasn’t the time. He pointed to his head. “I know up here that it doesn’t make sense. It’s not your fault even that you showed up where or when you did. Random chance. But in here,” he said, pointing to his heart, “I just feel the need to blame somebody.”
“I can’t make up for what happened to your uncle,” I said. “Nothing I do can make it any better. But you can.”
Philip nodded. “I can try.”
Bennie said, “If I had been Jade, I would have gone to someone else for help with Uncle’s tasks. Someone in America maybe. Someone more qualified than us. But Jade honored our uncle’s request, Phil. So he honors us.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Philip. “It’s kinda crazy, leaving all this to us,” he said, almost accusingly.
“It is,” I agreed. “Maybe it’s another bad decision. Up to you. No pressure.”
“Holy shit,” said Philip. Looking back, it almost seems like it was on cue.
“Change of subject?” I asked.
“Hell yeah. This bot that Bennie isolated out of Moreland’s blood sample. It’s receiving a beacon.” He laughed wildly. “Holy shit on a stick!”
I stood up and walked over to him. “A beacon?”
“Yeah. The bad news is that the X-ray machines didn’t kill the bots. But check out the good news. Check out the map. See the translucent yellow circle?”
He pointed to a yellow circle around a building on the edge of a bay on a satellite map. It was pulsing. “Yeah, I see it,” I said. I thought the map area looked like San Francisco Bay.
“Took me two hours to figure this out. But that is Longtooth. Or whoever is controlling Moreland’s nanobots.”
“Then why isn’t he here with his army of Wurdulac?” I asked.
Bennie asked, “Why do you not use an “s” when saying Wurdulac in plural form?” I just shook my head. Suddenly the kid was an English major?
Philip’s smile was gleaming. “Because it’s only going one way. The nanobot is only receiving. Not sending. And Longtooth is only able to send the beacon of his location. He’s not able to send instructions. In fact, maybe the very act of his trying is resulting in this beacon. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But the thing is, the whole system is on the fritz or something.” He laughed. “There’s a bug in the bugs!”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying we can see where he is, but he can’t see where we are?”
Philip’s head nodded so excitedly I thought it would fall off his neck to the floor and roll to the next table.
“That’s a big bug,” said Bennie.
“No QA team,” laughed Philip. “Always have a good QA team. Number one rule of software and hardware engineering.”
“QA?” I asked.
“Quality assurance engineer,” he said.
I laughed at that. “Okay,” I said. “But it’s just one bot. Won’t the other nanobots be working as expected?”
“They’re networked. I don’t know how it works yet. But they’re networked. They are all receiving the beacon, but they’re not sending one.” He tapped on his computer, which was hooked up by a USB port to a digital microscope.
“And this didn’t happen because of Moreland zapping herself with the airport security X-ray?” I asked.
“Nope,” said Philip. “I think it is the result of something comparable to a firmware update. They tried to update the bots’ hardware, and it failed, creating a massive defect in the system.”
“QA teams are so important,” said Bennie with a smile.
“I’m sorry?” I asked. “I don’t get it. How do they update hardware from far away?”
“Chip microcircuitry often has routines built into it. Like these bots do. It’s like software, really, wired right into the, umm, wiring. So they tried to update the software that makes the hardware work like they want it to, the hardware being the bot and its circuitry, and, well, they messed up. This location beacon is dumb, too. It’s just a GPS thing. It doesn’t do anything else. It can’t establish the proper network protocol to establish the kind of connection needed to deliver the fix they need.”
“That sounds like a big mess-up,” I said.
“The biggest. Because they can’t communicate with it to update it with a patch,” said Philip. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“They would have by now,” said Bennie.
“Not if they don’t have the patch ready,” said Philip. “But I don’t think they can communicate with these things anymore. Which itself is good.”
“No wonder Moreland didn’t bludgeon everybody to death when she arrived here. We thought it was just that Longtooth isn’t around.”
“He’s not. That building is in San Francisco. So, he had a longer range than we thought, maybe. I don’t know yet. And the nanobots from Moreland’s blood aren’t even sending a location beacon back. They’re sending nothing.”
“Well, Moreland will be pleased,” I said. “If these things are in Charly? Same thing? Daphne?”
“Almost one hundred percent yes,” said Philip.
“They could have targeted only Moreland with the latest firmware update,” said Bennie. “As a test. Since they don’t seem to have a QA team.” I looked at Bennie blankly. “Sorry,” he added.
“No. I don’t think so. These guys are making the same mistake that every fat-headed world-wrecker makes,” I said. “And that mistake is that they think they won’t make mistakes. That they know more than anyone else. I’ve met Longtooth. I know him. I know he thinks that way.”
“I kind of met him, too,” said Philip sadly.
“Me too,” said Bennie. “We want to show him how important having a good QA team is, right, Phil?”
Philip nodded. “Hell, yeah.”
I texted Moreland the news.
Then I texted Owens: “Whatever you’re doing out there, get ready to stop. I’m coming out to get you. We found a way to beat these guys.” I didn’t know what way that was yet, but I believed it anyway. I texted Owens the basics of what Philip told me. I looked at the brothers. “I should say, Dr. Chua’s nephews found a way.”
Owens texted back, saying, “We’ll fly out. Detective Garrison nearly lost a lung from that last flash.” I wondered if we could wait the twenty-four hours for them to fly to Singapore. But since Charly and Daphne might be back by then, I realized that it was worth the risk to wait.
I next wondered if the Bris would be willing to be part of a new vampire special forces team I had in my head. I texted Moreland to find out. She responded a few minutes later saying the Goa girls would consider it if I played the white violin for them first. With Daphne on her drum.
“Oh, one more thing,” Moreland added to another text. “They want you both to be naked when you play.”
I called her: “Seriously, Moreland? You want me to arrange to have someone send my violin out here to Singapore and find a big ass kettle drum for Daphne to play? Shit, I haven’t even got Daphne here with me, much less a drum for her to play on.”
“If you want their help you’ll figure something out,” she said.
“And they’re calling me a child,” I said.
“You’re on speaker,” said Moreland.
“Good,” I said. “Because I don’t have time for this shit. We know where he is, Moreland. What if we lose the connection, so to speak?”
“We won’t,” said Philip. “I’ve already replicated the network protocol they’re using. The bot could die now, but I’ll still be able to receive Longtooth’s location pings from my laptop. It’s on an automated loop. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in his blood system. Even better? I think I can fool him into thinking he’s back in communication with his bots. I can imitate a swarm using code on this laptop. Once I do that, he’ll try to send instructions, but he’ll be sending them to the laptop, instead of to Moreland. I don’t know the response I should send yet. Maybe these twenty-four hours will give me time to figure that out.”
“Response. What do you mean?” I asked.
“Almost all networks use something like a handshake. It’s even called that usually. When one network sends a request to another, the other sends a response. Such as, OK.”
“Or, 404. Can’t find what you’re asking for!” added Bennie.
“Yeah,” said Philip. “If I can figure out what the response should be, by that I mean, the response we should send back, we can trick Longtooth into thinking he’s sending instructions to Moreland.”
A tinny echo of five voices from my phone faintly said, “That sounds divine. We do enjoy games.”
Moreland said, “They’re in.” She paused and said, “But when this is over, they want a violin and drum recital in the buff.”
“Tell them they have a deal,” I said. I didn’t know if Daphne would appreciate the proposal, but this was a classic case of worrying about it later.
With the Mouras Encantadas involved, I didn’t need to wait for Charly. I didn’t need to wait for Owens, either, but, and it pains me to say this, I didn’t fully trust an operation against Longtooth without him.
Dr. Chua had isolated the Wurdulac gene that enabled them to hide their visibility, but Bennie didn’t think he could replicate it for our own use in twenty-four hours. “According to my uncle, the body doesn’t become invisible. It plays a trick on the viewer’s eyes by making it appear that the body is visually blending with its surroundings.” That explained Longtooth’s disappearance into the wall of the house. Longtooth didn’t disappear. My eyes thought he did.
“But why appear at all during a fight?” I wondered out loud.
“Maybe they can’t make physical contact with other life forms without reappearing?” suggested Bennie.
“But technically, they are there. And I could have killed Longtooth as he was melding into the wall,” I said.
“As he was pretending to,” corrected Bennie.
“This is still very helpful, Bennie. Even if we can’t use it, we know what’s going on. Maybe dropping in on Longtooth will give us the element of surprise we need, and their advantage will be gone,” I said.
Philip was shaking his head. “You still won’t know how many of those other things are around.”
“Wurdulac?” I asked.
“With an ‘s’”, said Bennie. “As in more than one.” When I gave him a dirty look, he shrugged.
“Yeah,” said Philip. “There could be a bunch of them there and you won’t know.”
Bennie said, “They won’t be hanging around all invisible in Longtooth’s place. They won’t have any reason to think they should.”
I told Philip about WallaceCam, whose exploits he had seen on the internet, and asked him how difficult it would be for him to create something like that in a day. I felt a tug on my heart when I asked that, thinking about Raygun. I thought maybe I could sneak a device like Wallace into Longtooth’s location, disappear, and spy on him. But as soon as I suggested it, I felt incredibly sad.
“If we were in one of those James Bond movies I could do it in a half-hour,” said Philip. “But since we’re not, I’m guessing a lot more than a day. Sorry. Besides, I think you’ll want me to spend the next twenty-four hours learning as much about these bots as I can.”
That sounded fine to me, so I grabbed each brother by the shoulders and gave them a big hug, then left to strategize with Moreland and her mean girls.
A new problem surfaced immediately. The mean girls couldn’t flash. They tried mightily, but with no results. Moreland and I both cajoled, taught, lectured, and encouraged, but to no avail. This was an especially unfortunate turn of events because Brilexus had the brilliant idea of the Mouras Encantadas showing up before anyone else at Longtooth’s location, thinking it would throw Longtooth off his game. I considered that a perfect diversion. When I had said to her in reaction, “See? You know damn well how seductive you are,” the five-voiced echo said, “Silence!” Still, I felt like I had made a good point.
We knew that Longtooth was in San Francisco, but the problem, of course, was that he could move somewhere in a flash, so sending the Mouras Encantadas by airplane seemed like a silly notion.
I pondered another possibility. I asked Bennie to take a DNA sample of the Goa girls, who were none too keen on the idea. They finally relented, and Bennie reported that they were missing the gene that made it possible to flash. “I can use CRISPR technology to add it, but I can’t promise they won’t need additional gene editing.”
“Crisper?” I asked. “Never mind, I’m getting tired of all the technobabble.”
But Bennie couldn’t help himself. “It’s like using a pair of scissors at the molecular level to add, delete, or modify a gene. I know the precise sequence I need to add. Well, my uncle knew, and he left the information behind for us. But there is a risk. If there is some kind of supporting gene for it, I could cause damage. Something I can’t even guess at.”
The five vampires were in the lab while Bennie described the situation. I looked at them and said, “Like, cause mutations? Turn them into glass-covered Singapore skyscrapers with shiny black hair? They’re already pretty tall. They can live with that.” The five hissed in unison, just like I hoped they would. “With hot legs,” I added, thinking about how they looked in their robes when they crossed their legs. The glare sent my way was enough to melt said glass.
“No,” said Bennie. “Not a mutation. Probably some side effect from flashing. I wish I had more time.”
“How long does this process take to evaluate?” asked Brilexus.
“With the way your species processes anything that’s blood-related? Not more than twelve hours, but maybe only an hour or so,” answered Bennie.
“I shall be your scientific experiment,” said Brilexus. The echoing five voices then said, “We absolve you of any harm you may cause us.”
Bennie looked at me. “I’m really nervous about this whole idea.”
Brilexus bent down, her hair covering Bennie’s laptop as she did so, and nearly touched his nose with her lips when she whispered, “This hesitancy makes you trustworthy. You shall proceed.”
“Shit,” Bennie said.
Brilexus stood up and smiled at me. “I enjoy this little human. Perhaps he could be my permanent pleasure in Goa after we destroy the foul Longtooth.”
The echoing voices said, “We have many such pleasures in our home. We should like to add him to our stable.”
“He’s taken,” said Philip.
“I am?” responded Bennie. He looked at Brilexus. “Well, that’s very nice of you to offer, but I have my classes.”
Brilexus nodded slowly.
Bennie strapped on blue exam gloves, obtained a DNA sample from Brilexus, and went to work. He sat at a table that looked like an art table. A blue metal top angled toward him was filled with vials and thin white squares. There was something that looked like a large white plastic syringe, but it lacked a needle. In other words, I have no idea what was on that table. It all looked very important.
While Bennie worked on his project, Philip worked on his. Moreland and the five Goa vampires hung out at the far end of the lab discussing strategy under the assumption that Bennie’s attempts to inject the five vampires with the magic gene would be successful. I frequently looked at my phone to the point where Brilexus asked Moreland with an unmistakable air of disdain, “Are you quite sure he is not human?”
Moreland said that I might have been the first case of a vampire turned into a human. I gave her the finger. If only, I wanted to say, but Daphne’s excursion to Madagascar would presumably change my thinking about wanting to lose my vampirism once she finally turned. Of course, Daphne was the reason I was checking my phone. I contemplated what the Mouras Encantadas would say if they knew I was in love with a human woman, but then I realized that Moreland, never reluctant to put me at a disadvantage in any social situation, had probably already told them.
So, I just said, “I like humans. A lot.”
Rather than give me grief, the Mouras Encantadas echoed, “So do we,” but in a very different tone than I used. Charly was probably the only vampire I knew who came close to understanding my feelings toward humans, and even he thought I was a bit of a freak, despite nearly a century of feeding together. I was the only vampire I knew capable of falling in love with one. Vampires looked at humans with antipathy, and, frequently, disgust. Nothing would change this. Our symbiotic relationship, even when humans were aware of our existence and feared us, was resented more by vampires than by those we fed upon.
The next several hours were all about waiting. Waiting for Charly and Daphne. Waiting for Bennie and Philip to finish their work. Waiting for Owens and Garrison to arrive from Atlanta. Meanwhile, news reports of additional Wurdulac attacks stopped blowing up our phones. Philips’ diagnosis regarding Longtooth’s quality control team seemed correct. It was beginning to appear that Longtooth had lost communication with his Wurdulac army.
There was no quality control, so we finally caught a break.
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