Psalm of Vampires: Chapter Twenty
Feeding State
For the next part of our story, we need to fast forward past the next few days filled with details regarding mundane procedures involving Owen’s surprisingly quick recovery, the collection and transport of a Wurdulac body from Jerrold Rubber Products to Dr. Chua, and general discussions regarding our next moves and tactics.
The transport of the Wurdulac body from the industrial building in Jerrold Mountain was an adventure of its own, but since it was handled by Charly and two of Moreland’s friends, Stormcycle and Morgenthau, I’ll let Charly tell it someday if he’s so inclined. Needless to say, since the area was cordoned off with yellow tape and about fifty law enforcement vehicles, the extraction was a bit complicated.
Dr. Chua’s analysis comparing my DNA to Longtooth’s had not yet revealed the magic sequence, but Dr. Chua thought he was close. He was excited about the Wurdulac because he thought more information would help bring the answer closer.
Charly did an amazing job when he retrieved the corpse. He had targeted what Moreland called a pregnant Wurdulac. The beast had a distended stomach, which Charly interpreted as a belly full of human remains. When Dr. Chua performed an autopsy, he first focused his attention on the contents of the Wurdulac’s gut. I wanted to question why he’d be interested in examining desiccated human remains, but he answered me before I could ask by telling me that if he wanted to solve the mystery of what happened inside the vile creatures’ digestive system, he needed to understand why the Wurdulac fed on humans.
The answer was worse than we could have ever imagined.
“Somehow,” Dr. Chua said as we sat in a meeting room on a rainy Singapore morning, “A portion of the remains are converted into hundreds of embryos smaller than poppy seeds. The rest is expelled.”
“Shat?” asked Charly. Dr. Chua nodded grimly.
Hearing that news while we sat around a table furnished with several conference call phones and sleekly carved glass pitchers of water, which created the atmosphere of a rich tech company meeting room, was surreal. As we digested the news, a curtain of rain obscured the Singapore skyline through the meeting room’s glass windows. A large flat-panel TV hanging from the wall opposite the windows displayed various chyrons about the situation from a perpetually alarmed cable news service.
Dr. Chua, Charly, Moreland, Owens, Garrison, Daphne, and I sat around the table, each of us dressed in our own distinctive styles, each with our own glass pitcher of water. Two smartly attired women in business skirts and white blouses added plates of pastries to the tabletop.
I was dressed in my usual way, with a pair of white hemp pants and a navy nehru shirt. Charly was dressed most simply, in a tee-shirt and cargo pants that would have looked baggy on anyone else but barely contained his legs, which looked like sequoia trunks equipped with large, rounded kneecaps hiding under layers of muscle. Daphne in the last couple of days had been gravitating back toward a near-Goth look. Her black shirt was decorated with black mesh fabric between her shoulder and elbow, which created the impression of a dark-winged human. Her black skirt covered black leggings splattered with dark gray lightning bolts. Moreland wore a navy trench coat, and probably nothing else underneath. Chua’s white lab coat and Garrison’s grey suit over a white Oxford shirt rounded out Chua’s motley audience. Then there was Owens, who was doing sort of a Superfly look with a zippered white overcoat over a white crew neck and enough gold-colored bling to double the weight of his borrowed Lincoln Continental.
“In fact,” Dr. Chua continued, “one could almost suggest that the Wurdulac gut, post-feeding, is indeed filled with seeds. Wurdulac seeds. Destination unknown, of course. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer yet on what aspect of ingesting human remains facilitates the development of these embryos. The most peculiar thing, although certainly not the most alarming, is that the DNA does not fully match the Wurdulac DNA I have inspected. I would say that the DNA is a closer match to this Longtooth fellow’s DNA, but it’s not a precise match to that, either.”
Dr. Chua seemed to be thinking out loud now. “Perhaps,” he said, “the species requires some specific genes within the human genome to accomplish whatever its task is to reproduce using this method. I’m afraid that discovering what these genes are will take some time.”
“Standmoore, I’m still thinking about that last entry in your grandfather’s diary, for lack of a better word,” said Garrison to Owens.
“When I was young,” said Owens, “I considered it a scrapbook.”
Garrison nodded.
“And I’m still wondering about transporting to a person instead of a place, Garrison,” I said, although I was looking at Moreland. Moreland looked away without saying anything.
Garrison continued: “Okay. Well, in it, he poses a question: Battue maybe somehow changing biology of the sabretooth? What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“Changing how the Longtooth behave, maybe?” I said. “Among other things. I dunno. The Longtooth clan don’t socialize with humans. But they weren’t genocidal.”
Moreland nodded her head. “They don’t like humans, but they didn’t kill them for the sake of killing them. They don’t kill them for sport. Some other clans have, like the Battue, but they’re all gone. Or so we thought. The Longtooth have traditionally hunted at night. In stealth mode.”
“There always seems to be some Battue loitering somewhere,” I said as if registering a complaint. “The Longtooth mostly avoided contact with humans, other than to feed. One reason for that is the sheer impossibility of mingling with humans without alarming them. Big teeth and all. Anyway, they are careless about feeding. Always have been. But, at least in Longtooth’s case, he always talked a bigger game than he played. By that, I mean that he would beat his chest a lot and talk about how fun it is to snuff out humans, but he didn’t act on it, at least I didn’t think so. After seeing him recently, I just don’t know.”
“I believe I understand the theory you are all attempting to pursue,” said Dr. Chua. “That perhaps the Battue have initiated a change in this Longtooth clan. Correct?”
“Shit doc, we’re just extrapolating bullshit out of whatever gets thrown at us at this point,” said Owens.
Garrison continued: “I ain’t thinkin’ that such behavior could be introduced through DNA. Behavior, now, that is typically governed more by environmental concerns, and upbringing and such.”
“I don’t understand,” said Moreland. “Are you guys suggesting that there is a Battue somewhere influencing Longtooth, rather than this whole mess being Longtooth influencing or altering the DNA code of the Wurdulac?”
“I’m just an old, fat cop,” sighed Garrison. “I got no clue what is happening, so I’m just throwing stuff against the wall.”
“You’re not that old,” smiled Owens.
Garrison ignored him: “Guesswork is sometimes a big part of the job. But I just can’t get that last entry out of my head. The other day, after Standmoore gave me that rundown on this whole affair, Mourning here told me about Standmoore’s grandfather. This group of vampires hunted him down. Tried to kill him.”
“The Battue. But the group was a group of two. One of which I never found,” I corrected. “The other, I killed.”
“Here’s what I think, for what it’s worth,” said Garrison. “I think that vampires… man, it just sounds weird saying that out loud. Like if our precinct commander hears me say it, I’ll be shuffling papers that assign drunk guys in holding cells to court dates.”
“You’ll probably be one of them before this is over,” said Owens.
“That I might,” said Garrison. “Anyway. I wonder if vampires ain’t undergoing what humans must have gone through when homo sapiens was establishing its dominance and fightin’ them Neanderthals. There’s a fight taking place. A fight for dominance. We don’t really know who’s involved. Even you vampire folks don’t know.” Garrison looked at me, then Charly, then Moreland. “I can’t believe I just said that. Sheeit.”
Garrison continued, more animated this time. “I think this Longtooth clan maybe is a conduit for somethin’ bigger. Two clues as to why. One, that last entry I’m thinkin’ on. Two, this Wolfie fella, who seems completely outside the thread of the story. See, I don’t think Longtooth was in Jerrold Mountain to find out who or what killed Wolfie. I think he was there to kill Wolfie, at the behest of this Battue clan Owens’ grandpaps had a run-in with. Now, whether this Battue clan had some kind of hold over Longtooth, or whether they messed with his DNA somehow to establish some kind of mind control, who’s to say?”
“Or, and call me crazy, Longtooth is just a sociopathic dickhead,” said Owens. “Sometimes, that’s part of being a cop, too, Gare. Finding the dickheads and taking them out of the game. Anyway, there’s no tactical reason for killing someone like Wolfie. He was just an old vampire on a remote mountain.”
“A sociopath maybe toward humans,” said Moreland. “He never liked them. Never. But you’re suggesting that he’s killing vampires, now, but he’s always considered vampires an endangered species. He’s been vocal about this. Violently so, sometimes.”
“Like I said, more in words than deeds,” I said. “Unless you know something I don’t, Moreland.”
“Well, I know for a fact that he’s killed humans, but my experience is the same as yours, Jade,” replied Moreland. “He’s sloppy. Purposely sloppy, I’d say, though. He enjoys a good, thorough feeding.”
“Don’t we all,” said Charly, staring a hole through Owens. I had a feeling their unofficial truce would always be one hunger pang from being on the skids.
Meanwhile, a ticker on the news channel began to alert viewers about the alarming scale of an attack like the one in Jerrold Mountain, this time a small village named Planina Milanovac along the Danube in the municipality of Golubac, Serbia. Daphne had been trying to capture our attention over it for the last day or so, without much success. She changed the topic of the current conversation by pointing to the TV and saying, “The town in Serbia is another mountain town. Only about eleven hundred people live there. Serbian authorities, it says here,” she added, looking at her phone, “are saying they’re all gone.”
When we first heard about an attack in Serbia, I didn’t think much of it. Then the reported number of deaths escalated. When Daphne mentioned the Danube, my brain caught fire. “The Danube was a Battue stronghold for years,” I said. “Between Owen’s grandpapa and me, I bet we killed twenty Battue in that region.”
Everyone looked at me. “Hey,” I said. “The Battue are almost as bad as the Wurdulac, and a whole lot smarter. Besides,” I shrugged. “Rondell did the killing. I only pointed the way.”
Owens laughed. “You’re a goddamned vampire hunter.”
“I told you all about our fight against the Battue, Owens. I also told you that you that me and your grandfather were friends. You just didn’t want to believe it.”
“No. You never said it like that. Implied it, maybe.”
Moreland looked cross. “You and who? Owens’ grandfather? You never said you had that kind of history with him.”
“Sorry,” I said. Moreland’s not the only one who can do sarcasm. “Did I forget to send you my diaries for those months of my life? If it helps, we didn’t get along that great,” I lied.
“More like weeks,” Owens said, “The notes in my grandfather’s scrapbook said he was in Serbia for a couple of weeks. I remember it well because the scrapbook included an entourage of local bodyguards he hired after hearing that Serbia was worse than the deep south when it came to people of African descent, but it turned out not to be so.”
“I got there ahead of him,” I said. “Call it advance scouting.”
“Shit, dude,” Charly said to me.
“Cut the nativism routine, Charly. You’ve seen what Longtooth is capable of. You’ve seen what the Wurdulac do. The Battue are a hell of a lot worse than Longtooth. They’re Wurdulac with brains.”
“I dunno, man,” said Charly. “The fact that you traveled all the way to Serbia, when it was still under Tito, right? Went through all that trouble to kill fellow vampires. That’s like walking into a prison dressed as a chaplain to kill the prisoners.” It wasn’t like that, but I let it go.
“Fun fact, Charly. Half of Tito’s inner circle and security were vampires under the control of… holy shit.” I was silent for a moment. I needed to process this.
“What?” asked Daphne and Moreland in a weird, synchronized moment.
“The Yugoslavian government under Tito was ruthless in its determination to get all its restless human ethnic groups to live under one roof. The Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians, etcetera. I’ve forgotten all about this. But Tito had, literally, an army of mindless vampires under his command. I never figured out how he made them so compliant. They were like automatons. Tito, though, he was a human. His top general, someone no humans knew, was a Battue named Thangord. Trust me when I tell you that he’s not in the history books. I didn’t stick around long enough to figure out what was going on. Yugoslavia in those days was a scary place, even for vampires. I got in, sniffed out a few bad guys, and got out.”
“A Battue working for a human? Sort of doesn’t fit the narrative of Battue history, Jade,” said Charly.
“I spent more time eluding his vampire automatons than doing anything else. The place was a gauntlet,” I said.
Garrison spoke up: “Maybe it was the other way around.”
That brought an edgy silence to the table.
Garrison continued: “Maybe Tito worked for Thangord. Maybe Tito was a human figurehead.”
Owens said to me, “I assume that Thangord was not one of the Battue you eliminated?”
I shrugged and said, “Can’t say I’m unhappy that I never met the dude.”
“My friend Stormcycle is sort of an expert on East European history,” said Moreland. She tapped furiously on her phone.
“Anyway,” I said, “Rondell and I followed a trail. It was all Rondell. He was trying to exact vengeance against the Battue that threw him into the lake. The trail led to the lower Danube, not to Belgrade. Not to Thangord, either.”
“Garrison is right,” said Moreland, still looking at her phone. “Storm says that Yugoslavia was set up as a feeding state.”
“Feeding state? What does that even mean?” asked Owens.
“Its entire reason for being was to act as a formal feeding ground for the Battue,” said Moreland. “Or so says Storm.”
“Shit, Moreland, what exactly did you ask Stormcycle?” I asked.
She scrolled her phone and said, “My exact question was, ‘What can you tell me about Yugoslavia?’ Storm said that its leader was controlled by the Battue. So that they could have a feeding ground without political interference.”
“Tito was sort of famous in human geopolitical circles for keeping the Russians out. The Americans, too,” I said. “Quite a trick considering where Yugoslavia was located.”
“Right in the middle of the old Soviet orbit, right?” asked Garrison.
“Yep,” I said. “All the surrounding states were part of the Iron Curtain.”
“Oh my God,” said Daphne. “Could that be happening in North Korea, too?”
She was sitting next to me, so I put my hand on hers. “Completely shut off from the world? I hope not, but it’s possible.”
“So, why now?” asked Garrison. “And what does Jerrold Mountain have in common with this place in Serbia?”
“Vampires,” said Dr. Chua. “Most assuredly. You stated that Jerrold Mountain had a significant vampire demographic.” Leave it to a scientist to put it like that, I thought. “Perhaps the citizens of Planina Milanovac had a similar understanding with vampires in their town that citizens in Jerrold Mountain had in theirs.”
“Why do we assume that it was their town?” asked Charly. “Maybe the town was established by vampires, and humans infested the place.” Good old Charly. He was no Longtooth, but he did have his own prejudices against humans.
“Okay,” said Garrison. “I guess I kind of figured that much out. No, what I am interested in, is, what went so wrong in both places that somebody, Longtooth, or the Battue — I’m not sure it matters yet who — decided they needed to wipe out the town?”
“The plague,” I said. No response. “The plague is what went wrong.” Still no response. I didn’t see the need to expand on this, so I waited.
A little more awkward silence, and then Owens said, “This is the worst science fiction movie I’ve ever seen. I want my money back.”
Garrison smirked, then said, “I can buy your theory, Mourning. We were wondering what Wolfie’s connection was to all this. But what? What specifically went wrong? An experiment gone bad? In two very distant places?”
“You’re the detective, detective,” I said. “Detect. Because I don’t have a clue. I’m throwing crap at the wall, too.”
“And it smells like shit in here,” said Owens. “I have met Longtooth, and so has my hand and neck.” He lifted his bandaged hand off the table. “This jagoff doesn’t need a reason to kill anybody. A whim is enough reason for him. You know, he may just be doing all of this for fun. And to watch us all dash across the world to try an’ figure it all out.” Owens looked at an alert on his phone.
Garrison must have received the same alert because he looked at his phone at the same moment. “Captain wants us at the precinct,” he said to Owens.
I had already transported Owens and Garrison separately a couple of times during the last two days, which wore me out. It was early morning in Singapore, which meant it was evening in Atlanta. “I’m exhausted,” I said. “I’m not even sure I can do it again yet,” I said in an obvious reference to getting the two men back to Atlanta. “Maybe Charly can do it.”
“We tried that once, remember?” said Owens. “We ended up in a honkytonk in Philadelphia.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” said Charly. “I’m happy to try again if you can serve up your Captain for breakfast.”
I had never seen Owens pray. He looked up at the ceiling and said, “Lord, whatever I did to deserve these clowns, I repent.”
“Tell your captain that you’re tied up for now. Ask him what it’s about,” I said.
“It’s nighttime there. It’s important. He knows I know that,” said Owens. Garrison nodded his head in agreement.
“Ask him anyway. It might be something we all need to know.”
“You do it,” said Owens to Garrison. “Me and Cap aren’t exactly sleeping in the same bed lately.”
Garrison laughed. “You’ve been on the couch for at least a few,” he said. Garrison typed something into this phone. “I just asked him what’s up.”
While we waited for an answer, I got a text from Bennie Chua. It was a photo taken the previous night of him celebrating in a bar with Lucy Lee and Philip. Lucy Lee had missed her test but was able to take a makeup thanks to a very convincing written alibi from the esteemed Dr. Chua Mi Tien. Bennie reported that he and Lucy Lee aced their organic chemistry test in magnificent fashion. I sent a drink emoji. Bennie responded by saying he had a headache from the night before, then sent a coffee emoji. I was surprised at how glad I was for Bennie. I liked both brothers a lot, but what I noticed was that my feelings toward the humans I cared about were developing a new layer. I was evolving in ways I never would have imagined five hundred years ago.
Was there something different about modern humans? I wondered about that while watching the two cops banter about their captain. I realized that humans had evolved from utter barbarism in a short amount of time. Human civilization had not so long ago been all about who could best emerge from violent squabbles between alpha dogs. In many ways, this is still true, but many modern human alphas gained power through the accumulation of wealth instead of through slaughter. I considered this progress.
Enlightenment over environmental destruction, industrial toxins, and such obviously simple but for some reason elusive concepts as racial and gender harmony, while still incomplete, were now accepted norms. All of this made humans easier in general to get along with. When people aren’t fighting against basic tenets of morality, they’re much more pleasant to hang out with.
The Longtooth seemed to be going in a reverse direction. Their stance against humans hardened. The Battue, if we were still dealing with them like it seemed we might be, appeared to be digging in even harder. If I could have said one thing to Longtooth before the loss of Jerrold Mountain, it would have been this: that intolerance leads to extinction, and that the collective soul of the universe insists that we overcome our past and our most violent, base instincts. Since it was too late to say it to Longtooth, I said it to Charly, whom I sometimes worried about.
“It’s all in the music, my brother,” he responded.
“Music?” As I asked, Garrison scurried out of the room with his eyes on his phone. He had earbuds on, which I could usually hear, but I heard nothing from them.
“Music carries the thread of love. If science is your God’s language of how everything works, music is his language of love,” Charly said.
“Her language,” said Daphne. Charly smiled at her.
“Well, this is all just so sweet it makes me want to gash something with my sword,” said Moreland.
“I think technically it’s my sword,” I said, remembering how she acquired it by smashing the glass that encased it at my estate.
She unsheathed it and slid it violently across the table to me, knocking over one of the fancy glass pitchers, which crashed and shattered on Dr. Chua’s stately marble flooring.
I stabbed at the sword with my index finger as it quickly slid my way, stopping it in mid-slide. “What’s got into you?” I asked, sliding it more peaceably back toward her.
“You, and your romance with humans,” said Moreland. “Ugh.”
“You don’t wear hate as well as you wear your outfits,” said Daphne. “Not anywhere near as good as you think you do.” Ouch. Daphne? I wondered. Is that you?
“You saying it’s an act, sister?” sneered Moreland.
“I’m saying it’s a part of you from a long time ago. But it no longer fits. And besides? It’s old and moldy and kinda gross.”
After Daphne said her piece, Moreland did her thing and disappeared in a flash of light.
“Wait!” I said. “You forgot your sword!”
“Too much?” asked Daphne, looking at me.
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “She’s still hurting. Big time. It’s bad enough that if she doesn’t get her daily hissy fit in, her body melts like a vampire in the sun. And you do something to her, Daph. Not in a bad way. You touch her in ways she’s uncomfortable with.”
“She’s got a legit beef,” said Charly. “We’re going after fellow vampires now.”
“It’s not the first time in history,” I said. “Especially with this crew.”
“I believe that a set of ethical and moral codes can be extended across multiple species,” said Dr. Chua. “Humans have often had to band together to reign in the most despicable among our tribe.”
“I understand that,” said Charly. “But we’re all making a lot of assumptions here. The physical evidence that Longtooth is responsible for Jerrold Mountain is approximately zero.”
“This isn’t an assassination plot,” I said to Charly. “We’re just trying to get intel. Time is growing short if the Serbian reports are accurate. So we probably do need to do a little more than just gather evidence. I don’t know what exactly, but something.”
“Why did he protect Daphne if he’s the bad guy?” asked Charly.
“Why did he get a goddamn hard-on when he did?” countered Daphne with a scowl.
“Why didn’t he try to stop any of the Wurdulac?” I added. “Maybe he covered Daphne during the attack as part of an act. And you saw what he did to Jones.”
“I thought you said Longtooth claimed Owens was an obansam.”
“The fork thing? Yeah, but who knows why he went after him in that house,” I said. “And anyway, only children believe that tale about an obansam.” Charly probably knew that I, like, all vampires, was childlike enough to believe the tale as an adult at various times. “He did it for pleasure. I was there. I saw the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.”
Garrison returned, practically stumbling into the room. “River’s Edge has been hit,” he said. River’s Edge was a toney bedroom community of golf courses and expensive lake houses north of Atlanta. “Here’s the weird thing,” said Garrison. “Not one house outside the boundaries of the town was attacked. Absolutely everything happened within the town’s formal boundaries.”
“That town is a gated community,” said Owens. “I don’t think you can even get in there without a hall pass. One road in, security guard at a gate. Very exclusive.”
“How many dead?” I asked.
“They don’t know. They can’t get in,” said Garrison.
“What do you mean they can’t get in?” I asked.
“They sent a SWAT team in. It didn’t come out. National Guard is on its way,” said Garrison. “Local sheriff says he’s lost three deputies just trying. Social media says something about a swarm of small, dragon-like creatures flying around. It’s a town of about fifteen hundred.”
“And the captain wants us to come in to do what exactly?” asked Owens.
“Well,” I said. “We should all go,” I said. “If this is happening now, there’s the proof Charly needs that Longtooth is behind all this. Or not. Longtooth will be around if he’s involved.”
“Man, I can barely move my head, Mourning,” said Owens.
“Longtooth is attracted to you.”
“Eat me.”
“I mean, your blood. You’re like catnip to him for some reason.”
At that moment, Moreland returned in one of her flashes, standing behind Daphne. Then she said, “I forgot something,” put her hands on Daphne’s shoulders, and they both disappeared.
Thanks for reading my least favorite chapter, lol.
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