Chapter Ten - "Not the Dial-A-Bullet Hotline"
The vampire in question was named Viktor Kolmach, and he was from eastern Europe. In accordance with the Hunter Accords, he'd checked in with the Hunt Captain of the Vampires, but hadn't been incredibly specific about where he'd be staying while he was in town, claiming he would be 'with friends' and had listed a couple of names as contacts.
This was where I
started
to get very annoyed, because the Hunt Captain hadn't been paying much attention to the 'friends' that Viktor said he'd be staying with, otherwise he would've noticed that one of them, Cassandra Liebitz, had been dead for a few years now, so Viktor was rather unlikely to be staying with her. The other, Max Stelford, was the guy who knew literally every vampire ever made, and putting him down as a reference was a running joke that someone didn't want to be found. Sure, Max might have seen you, but Max sees everybody, and Max remembers nothing. Viktor had probably checked in with Max, but Max also ran one of the busiest import/export businesses on the West Coast, so if Max didn't have to care, Max didn't care. Max wasn't bad people, just in high demand.
Over the years, I've had to work very hard to combat my prejudice towards vampires. I grew up knowing they were just people like everyone else, but I also remember seeing my first feeding when I was only seven years old. Dad had brought me and Charlotte along to a meeting, because he was always keen on making sure we were learning our tradecraft as early as possible, and on this particular day, Dad wanted to stress to us the importance of being able to look at every person without deciding things
about
them
for
them.
'Let people reveal themselves to you,' Dad said, 'and never dictate to them who you
want
them to be before they do.'
Charlotte and I had both worked as hard as possible to remember that lesson, but it had been extremely hard oftentimes.
On that day when I was seven, I watched a powerful vampire named Selene Baghera suckle on the neck of a young man who looked lucky if he was eighteen, although my father assured me that he was. Selene had come to barter to raise the hunting levels for vampires in the Colorado Rockies, and the negotiations had been taking quite a long while for reasons that I was, unfortunately, still a little too young to understand at the time.
In retrospect, I've since learned that there was a mass migration of vampires from both eastern Europe and the Middle East to the United States, in an effort to avoid being caught up in warzones that had broken out, and in order to not overextend any one particular zone, they'd scattered a great deal over the country, but it turned out many of them had found the Rocky Mountains to be excellent habitats. They didn't mind the cold, they sort of enjoyed winter sports and it was astonishing how many people died to exposure, leaving them to be feasted upon.
That said, they were in need of opening a handful of feeding lodges, places they could set up where men and women volunteered to be fed upon, usually in exchange for money, but sometimes just for the thrill of being fed on.
What can I say? Anne Rice books were big at the time, and vampire romance was flourishing in bookstores and libraries across the country. A few decades later, it would be those damn Twilight books. I'm convinced there's some vampire patron who's smart and owns a book company and makes sure there's always some kind of bodice ripper featuring vampires and of decent enough quality out there, converting a new generation into willing feed bags.
Selene needed to feed, and she had gotten a young man from a local feeding lodge sent over, and I will never forget the look of sadness in his eyes while he waited, only to see it disperse and be replaced by a look of great ecstasy as he drifted off while she drank deep of his blood.
That young man still works in one of the local feeder halls, although he's no longer young and spry. He still enjoys what he does, however, even if he does spend a few days each month on his back recovering from having his blood drained. I've talked to him a handful of times, and he's always told me that there isn't any greater moment in his life than those when he's being fed upon.
I can't tell you how much that scares the crap out of me.
One of the things I also learned early on in life was how to spot addiction, and those who like to be fed on generally had that in spades. People find something that gives them bliss, and for whatever reason, they'll sacrifice every other moment of happiness they have chasing a few more seconds of bliss. Me, myself, I'd rather make
every
moment as good as possible instead of trying to catch a falling star.
To me, vampires were, by their very nature, exploiting that human weakness, that addict's need to go chasing after an unquenchable high that they could never hold onto. I understand that it's part of their very nature, that they have to feed on blood to survive, but it's never sat right with me, the parasitic nature of their relationship with all the other species in the food chain.
So, I have to remind myself going into any situation where it comes to dealing with vampires that they aren't all bad people, because I just know my perception of them skews towards the negative. That's on me. I'm working on it, but, y'know, at the end of the day, vampires still drink blood. So there's only so much give room I got in me.
I could call Max and see if he remembered talking to Viktor, but I had a sneaking suspicion that was going to be a fool's errand. Max talked to more vampires on a day-to-day basis than I would in a month, maybe two.
I'd been to Ali Chen's feeder brothel, and while she hadn't known the fella in question, she'd been able to pick up his trail, at least a little bit. He'd been in a different feeder brothel, Countess Montrovo's, over near Russian Hill, and while he'd paid and fed like any other customer, the Countess warned the other feeder proprietors that he was someone to be kept an eye on, as she suspected he'd been 'wild fanging,' which was slang for feeding on the homeless population. It was a dangerous way to spread diseases to brothel workers, and the last thing any of them wanted to do was to have their whole world come collapsing down because some screener hadn't done their job. The Countess had warned all the other feeders in town that he should be treated as a new client, and they should run a bio screen on him before letting him feed.
Stopping by to see the Countess felt like the next natural stop, so I headed across town to visit my second feeder brothel in just a few hours. It wasn't my first time jumping between brothels in an evening, but this was for far less enjoyable reasons.
Montrovo's was, much like Ali Chen's, an entire building that screamed 'go away.' It was a three-story house that had a high fence around it and a little buzzer at the gate in front. The trees blocked most of the view of the place, although you could, at certain angles, see panes of one-way glass reflecting back the foliage around it. The views from those rooms were amazing, and added to the ambiance of the place like you wouldn't believe. I stepped up to the gate and pressed the button on the buzzer, looking up directly at the camera I knew was looking down on me from its nestled and concealed hideaway.
"Not time for an inspection," a familiar voice, deep, gruff, and heavily accented, says on the other end of the line.
"Relax, Brass, I'm not here to bust anybody's balls tonight," I tell him with a laugh. "Here to get a bit of info on a red flag you tossed up yesterday to the other feeders."
"What about it?"
"Can I come in, or you want to have this whole conversation with me standing out here on the street? Where anyone can walk by and hear about what kind of buis--" I wasn't even through the word when the gate buzzed and unlatched. "Thought not," I chuckled beneath my breath, heading though the opening, closing and latching it behind me.
At some point, Montrovo's had actually been someone's home, some wealthy rail or oil baron, likely, but they'd left it to Countess Montrovo when they'd died, and she'd been running it as a feeder brothel ever since and that had been over a hundred and fifty years ago. There was a small yard out front, with a lime tree off to one side, and a bench off to the other. Sitting on a series of wooden steps leading up from the walkway to the porch was Countess's right-hand man, Nils 'Brass' Novoka.
Brass was probably the most Russian soul I'd ever met. He was only 5'6" or so, with long black stringy hair that hung to his collarbone, his skin an off-white like soiled snow, his eyes always with large bags beneath them, his beard too long to be considered stubble but too inconsistent to be considered a real beard, his eyes cold and blue and ancient looking. He wore the rattiest blue jeans I'd ever seen, more tatters than actual pants at this point, a black leather jacket that probably was sewn together in the 1950s, and a white t-shirt with Bruce Springsteen's 'Born To Run' cover on it that had faded but was still legible, as if he'd taken care of that shirt more than anything else in his life. Down in the bottom right corner of it, though, there were still a few pink spots, blood stains that nothing had quite been able to get rid of. He was smoking one of those unfiltered Russian tar sticks they called cigarettes, and the scent of it wafted around him like a cloak of stench and midnight. He had a silver flask sitting next to him that I'd have bet just about anything on contained some of the purest, most distilled and chilled vodka this side of the Pacific.
He simultaneously looked nineteen and a thousand.
"So, if you are not here for inspection," he said, that voice still dripping with the accent of his homeland, "then why are you here, Gunslinger? Is this the day you and I finally draw down?" His hand hovered over his hip tentatively for a long moment before he and I both started laughing and he pointed a finger gun at me. "Pew pew!"
"Damn traitorous Russian!" I shouted in mock agony, clutching at my chest. "We were supposed to pace off!" For effect, I fell to my knees and pantomimed blood spurting from my chest like I was in Sam Peckinpah film. A few seconds later I laughed, stood back up and reached out to shake Brass's hand. "Heya comrade, how's it going?"
"De fuck are you doin' here, Gunslinger? This about that sketch fanger we sent the alert out about last week?" Brass shook his head and grumbled something in Russian I couldn't pick up. "I told the boss lady he was going to be trouble, but she said business is business, and as long as he's not breaking rules and screens clean, we let'em in. What did he do?"
"One confirmed kill, two possible others," I said as we started to walk up the stairs. "More annoyingly, he threw my ass out a window. Or, I suppose, if I'm being more accurate, he dragged my ass out a window and then flew off while I was trying to figure out how to not die."
Brass winced overdramatically, laughing a little bit. "Bet you must be
pissed
."
"You have
no
idea."
"No one is allowed to get the better of Dale Sexton," the Countess' voice purred as we entered the front living room, a handful of men and women loitering about, watching television or reading books. Like most feeder brothels, the 'feeder' aspect was kept to the background, and the place spent most of its time being an actual brothel, not that
that
was legal in San Francisco, either, but sex work had a long and storied history in the Bay Area, and people had been getting by for a long, long time, usually with the cops looking the other way as long as it kept disease and crime in check. And beyond that, we had an arrangement with the SFPD to ignore the feeder houses, as per the Hunter Accords. They'd initially not been thrilled at turning a blind eye to vampires living and working within the city limits, but when it had been explained to them that either we would have feeder houses or the vampires would be allowed free hunting throughout the city below an enforceable cap based on population, the SFPD wisely chose to keep a lower body count. "How've you been, Dale?"
Unlike her right hand man, the Countess Bella Montrovo had worked extremely hard to blend in, and instead of looking like she walked out of a Tolstoy novel, she looked much more the part of a local hippie dippy crystal queen, somewhere between the Free Love and New Age generations, with a big, billowy sundress that clung to her like a promise, her raven black hair smooth and silky, her figure full without being too Rubenesque. She was curvy in all the ways that would draw the attention of any red-blooded man or woman and hold onto it for as long as she wanted it. Any hint of accent she might have ever had was gone, and she spoke at least a dozen languages conversantly. In addition to running both the feeder and the brothel parts of the house, she also gave tarot readings and other forms of divination.
My late father, who certainly had his thoughts about 'predicting the future,' had never gone out of his way to rule the possibility out completely and told me that if I ever wanted a glimpse into the potentials that awaited me, the Countess was as close to the real deal as he'd ever come. He'd never tell me what she'd told him, but I knew my father well enough to know when he'd seen something he couldn't explain, and the one time I'd seen him come back from a reading by the Countess, he'd looked
shook
like I'd never seen, not before or since.
