Author’s note: Raw and unedited (mostly).
It’s my habit to make about 1,000 edits, rewrites, etc when writing a novel.
This is a first iteration. Who knows what the future holds?
Even the title is now just a working title and has a good chance of changing.
In other words, this is raw, unedited, and almost certain to change, possibly in major ways.
It helps to be familiar with characters from the first book in this series, Psalm of Vampires, but my goal is for this second novel in the series to stand on its own.
I recommend you read the Prologue before reading this chapter, though.
Feedback is welcome. If you enjoy this and enjoy the process of following a constantly changing work in progress, please restack and share with others who enjoy this kind of fiction.
Chapter One — The Fraudster
Nobody can hide in a room better than a vampire. Especially when his target is an inebriated couple moments away from self-inflicted wanton violence.
I didn’t need to be inside the apartment. I could have stood outside and heard every word, but I wanted to try the new, although ancient, trick I learned at Jerrold Mountain.
Blending into a wall where the only decoration was an old Vargas girl print in a black plastic frame, it was like I was right there with them.
A woman named Marge sat on a couch in nothing other than unzipped distressed blue jean shorts, accusing the man, through a drunken lisp, of infidelity. The alcohol coursing through her veins next made a series of promises about the condition of the apartment that could never be kept. “I swear I’ll clean every day, Billy, every day. Even the fuckin’ piss you leave on the floor next to the toilet.”
Normally, I hate feeding on drunks. The alcohol doesn’t affect my body, but the taste of the blood is foul. I was about to make an exception with Billy.
My wall blend was making me weak, so I released it to become an ashen shadow against the unpainted drywall, almost as if you imprinted my silhouette with a dark newspaper halftone, but with no features, just a dark grey shape.
The arguing couple noticed nothing. The booze had put blinders on. Their only focus was their besotted mutual hate.
Billy drifted into the small kitchen to get another beer, screeching something clever like, “You bitch!” in the middle of his side of the mutual tirade contest.
Marge spluttered something about “You and your fucking titles caused all this bullshit” as I neared her, my full body, dressed in my favorite black tuxedo, now looming over her.
That silenced her. My fangs jumped onto her neck, but the wretched taste of her blood forced me to spit it out onto the stained, worn carpeting, where it would fit right in.
Billy walked into the living room and tried to deliver one of his smart one-liners, “Who the fuck are you?” as Marge’s body convulsed enough to break a few ribs.
“Oh, come on,” I said as I approached him with my bloody canines exposed. “I barely got enough to knock her out.” I looked at her, then Billy. “She’s putting on an act, isn’t she, Billy.”
“Who the fuck are you?” he tried again.
By this point, I was ready to turn him into human jerky. But then I remembered James Coates.
Billy’s fate would have to wait until I knew more. Out of respect for Coates, I lunged into Billy’s neck, fangs first, and took just enough blood to knock him out.
“I can’t feed on this shit,” I said as I wiped my mouth with the bottom of his black Metallica t-shirt. I spat the blood into the blank white canvas his face had become, his eyes closed, his mouth agape like he was waiting for an oversized baby spoon.
I first encountered Billy while emerging into a downpour with Moreland from a Midtown restaurant.
Short videos of her exploits in Singapore had turned Moreland into a major celebrity, which transformed her usually foul mood into a bedrock of steaming hate. Her first impulse, which she didn’t try to contain, was to lay waste to an entire hamlet in the north Georgia Appalachian foothills.
The good news for her victims was that she didn’t kill them by draining them dry. The bad news for neighboring communities was that the people she turned did not possess the most stable of minds, which led them to an epic rampage through nearby towns.
When I asked her why she once again violated her own policy of not turning humans, she hurled sets of invectives not suitable even for these pages.
I would have thought that turning a dozen internet influencers only to see them killed by Wurdulacs would have knocked some sense into her. She had taken that hard, almost like she had lost her own children.
As for turning people in general, Moreland had never been a fan. But maybe once you get a taste, you go back to it like a drug you never should have tried in the first place.
I wanted to confront her on all this. We normally never hesitate to get in each other’s faces or call each other out, but this felt different. Personal. I let it go.
Instead, I told her that she was also increasing her celebrity status and spreading vampire lore, a concept she had always fought. More cussing.
We were arguing about this while leaving the restaurant when I saw Billy slap a woman and push her to the ground outside a bar next door.
“Let’s drain this guy,” I said.
But Moreland wanted no part of it. “Let Darwin do his thing,” she said. “It won’t take long with that dude. Besides, I thought you hated boozy blood.”
So I bid her a fond farewell, found a dark corner in the bar, and watched Billy drink himself half to death. I counted five occasions his noxious mouth almost led to a fight before he stumbled out of the bar and into his car, a black Tesla showing its age, but apparently on autopilot, since he wasn’t weaving when he drove.
I had a hard time keeping up at one point when he ran into a series of green lights on the quiet, after-hours roads lit by amber streetlights shrouded by a soft drizzle. It’s not like in the vampire movies, where we’re a blur when we run. It’s physical exertion, just like it is for you. We’re a lot faster than humans, but I can’t outrun a car that’s doing forty.
Luckily, the Tesla hit another long series of red lights until it found his apartment building. I was surprised I was able to tail him on foot the whole way. I did it for sport, really, not thinking I’d succeed.
Now that I had, I wanted to learn more about him, so I pinned his address for later.
I visited him three times. Enough to know that he wasn’t worthy of the typical symbiotic relationship that modern vampires like me maintain with humans.
This guy was a title fraudster. I had no idea what that was until I overheard him talking to Marge about it while I lurked outside. You might remember from earlier tales that vampire ears are pretty fantastic, even though they’re not pointed.
The conversation started something like this:
Marge: “You need to roll up all those deeds into a package and sell them on the dark net, Billy. This guy Coates is onto you.”
Coates, it turned out, was a housing attorney and director of the Atlanta Housing Justice Project. He had uncovered nearly a thousand of Billy’s deed thefts, tracking them almost right into Billy’s computer.
Deed theft is easy. All a crook needs to do is forge their name on a home’s title and submit it to the local county register of deeds. Boom, the deed is theirs. Most county registrars don’t bother investigating the veracity of the title. They just stamp it, take their fee, and say, “Next!”
After the bad guy hijacks the title, they can sell the property, rent it out, or suck its equity dry with second, third, even fourth mortgages.
That’s what Billy was doing. It’s illegal, but you’d be surprised how many homeowners get scammed, especially in a big city like Atlanta.
Somehow, James Coates found out, probably through a victim’s complaint, so I visited Coates to ask him a few questions.
Coates ran his operation from a small office on Peachtree Street next to a dentist's office. Even though he looked a little befuddled at first, and even though I don’t think he’d ever talked to a vampire, the first thing I noticed about him was that he maintained a beautiful Afro that he must have borrowed directly from the early 1970s. It was a beast of a thing, big, round, perfectly sculpted, perfectly trimmed. An art project.
When I sat across his desk, I could still see the top of his magnificent black globe of hair, even though it seemed to add another foot to his six-foot frame. I detected a small loop of white thread that I desperately wanted to pick out of his hair with one of my long purple fingernails.
After our introductions, even though my eyes and nose felt hunger, I told him to relax, I wasn’t there to feed. Instead, what I wanted was for him to feed me information.
“Well, you know, this stuff is new to all of us,” he said confidently. I knew what he was talking about, but I asked him anyway. “This whole vampire thing. Don’t y’all worry about, you know, the backlash? You know it’s coming.”
“I appreciate your concern,” I said. The press reviews on vampires had not been particularly glowing since the events in Singapore. “Short answer. No. Can you tell me about deed fraud?”
He did. When I pried information out of Coates about Billy, he wanted to know if I was working for Billy or if there was something else going on.
I assured him that I had no interest in supporting Billy’s scam.
“Are you… hunting him?” he asked. Smart guy. I lied and told him no, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. “It’s just that I’m sort of closing in on him. If you kill him, it might be more difficult to compensate people for their losses.”
Such empathy toward the soon to be dead, counselor, I wanted to say.
Like any good lawyer, he switched direction. “I’ve read enough about you, to, you know, sort of understand your species is divided into different camps. Just like us. And you seem to be one of the good guys. Are you one of the good guys, Mr. Mourning?”
“I dunno, man. I mean, I try? It’s complicated.”
Coates nodded.
I asked, “Do you think this guy’s money is locked up somewhere? Or is it fluid, in and out, living on the edge kind of stuff?”
“Well, that’s just it. Haven’t gotten far enough to tell. Hell, I’m just now at the point where I can present something to the DA, who, fortunately, I have a good relationship with.”
“Lucky you,” I said sarcastically.
He chuckled at that. “But what I’m presenting to the DA is just a bunch of forged documents. Not much more than that. I don’t know jack about his financial condition, what he does with the funds, how much he’s made off each scam. None of it, really. That’ll be the DA’s problem. I’m a civil attorney. I’ll sue this guy eventually. After the DA does her bit. Our organization has several clients we’re prepared to represent. But the criminal side? I leave that to others.”
“Sounds potentially lucrative for you,” I said.
“Not really. Fool’s gold. We’re a nonprofit.”
I knew that, I remembered that, but I was testing his face. I nodded. “No. I’m not going to kill him, Mr. Coates. Not if it prevents you from accomplishing your good work.”
He scowled. “I’m not sure how good it is. For every guy we catch, a thousand get away. It’s extremely frustrating. And easily fixed. All it takes is for the County to vet deed changes. Or better yet, for the state to impose some statutory validation requirements. But as you know, Fulton County is underfunded. They’d need a lot more than bake sales to add that capability to the registrar’s office.”
A simple feeding had turned into a bureaucratic quagmire. I didn’t know Coates, but I believed him. He was one of the good guys.
“Our humble investigative team did turn up one thing you might be interested in,” Coates continued.
I raised an eyebrow.
“As I said, I don’t know much about vampires. But we all now know one when we see one. Pretty much.”
“Yeah, sure. We’re all tall, but we’re not all purple. Most of us shed our skin so we can match the skin colors of the local population.”
“Well, I sort of knew that, but thanks for confirming. Anyway, one of the title frauds that has occurred is in a house where a local vampire appears to live. A fellow who goes by the name “Chevalier.”
I shook my head, not recognizing the name.
“The press has been very clear on this, but perhaps to assuage the fear of our easily frightened human population,” said Coates.
“An apt description,” I said. “Clear on what?”
“The press has probably stated a million times that there are only a few thousand of you left. So, I thought perhaps you’d heard of this Chevalier fellow.”
I had not, and I told him so. My mind went to work trying to guess which house Chevalier was from, but without more information, I was stymied.
“Is he also a fraudster?” I asked.
“No, no. He appears to be the owner of a house that was defrauded. A title forge victim.”
It was difficult for me to picture a vampire as a victim of a petty human crime, and I told Coates this, too.
“Understood. He’s on the list I have of Billy’s victims, though.” Coates tapped into his computer for a minute. “Last year. But Billy hasn’t attempted to sell the property or acquire any loans on it, or anything of that nature. The title change is it, so far. Kind of a long time doing nothing in my experience. Something is stopping him. Maybe it’s as simple as he got a look at the guy, but dudes like Billy don’t make house calls, so that seems unlikely.”
I still didn’t know much more about title fraud than I knew before meeting with Coates, but I knew one thing for certain: It was time to pay a visit to this Chevalier character.
Thanks for reading!
You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
I don’t use AI in my writing, so I don’t know how fast I’ll be cranking this out. Thank you for your patience and support of non-AI writing.
