The Pardoner's Tale Read online

  Naturally, that meant my cell phone had to vibrate.

  I read the text message, stood up, and stretched. I fished some money from my wallet and handed it to Alex. "Find your own way home, pal. I've got to go to work."

  "We."

  "You speaking French or implying that you're coming with me?"

  "I'm coming with you."

  "Okay." I nodded once. "Why?"

  He gave me his one-shoulder shrug. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?"

  I sighed and shrugged in return. I didn't see any harm in taking him with me. It wasn't anything dangerous or even interesting that I was being summoned to do. See, I'm not just a private investigator and I don't just hunt vampires. Mostly what I did was collection of possessed antiques and artifacts with the occasional exorcism thrown in. I went over the details of my job while we returned home.

  "You're a retriever," Alex said flatly when I explained what I did. The struggle to contain his laughter was valiant, but in vain. He threw himself into the chair he had claimed as his own and laughed until he was breathless.

  "It's not that funny, Alex."

  "You don't have the image I have. You, with a big fluffy tail, trotting down the street with the handle of a vase in your teeth."

  "Why would I be shifted?"

  "You weren't. I just threw in the tail because it was funny."

  I lovingly caressed the stake that I kept near the couch. He shut up.

  Alex watched me tap away at the computer. "So tell me what we're looking for?"

  "It's not what as much as it is who. What do you know about schizophrenia?" I jotted notes and continued to type and click. Alex curled up in the seat of the chair, dangling his legs over the arm. He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly, watching the light get caught in the smoke as it drifted toward the ceiling.

  "Hallucinations. Delusions. Makes me think of crazy people on the street, shuffling around talking to Elvis or Jesus or aliens."

  "That's it. But sometimes it's not just all in their heads. Sometimes it's somewhere else inside them."

  "What's that mean? That they really are talking to Elvis?"

  "Elvis or maybe some demon that likes to call itself Elvis. Or might actually be named Elvis. I've never really gotten too personal with them."

  Alex swung his legs to the front of the chair and leaned forward, staring at me. "I just find it a little hard to believe that there are demons hanging out in people who don't have anything better to do than make them shuffle around and beg for spare change. I mean, shouldn't it be more like spreading evil and hate and converting people to the side of darkness or something?"

  "That is what I'm telling you." I jotted down an address and shut down the computer. I looked at him. His mouth was set in a straight line and one eyebrow was cocked in clear disbelief. "It's funny that you of all people don't believe me. If you're a vampire and I'm a shifter, I'd think that would make you even more open to the idea of higher powers. Why couldn't there be a god? Why wouldn't there be one? Or even more than one? And if there's a god, why not demons, too? Think about it. You see those people and you get angry, don't you? Wish they'd just die or go away. You don't want them touching you. You don't want them talking to you. You look away. Ignore them. Cross the street to get away from them. Not very nice, right? Add up a whole bunch of little sins all the time and you end up with one very bad soul."

  I stood up and shoved Alex back in his chair so I could walk past him. I picked up my jacket and the black leather backpack that held the essential tools for my job. Without even bothering to wait for Alex, I left the house. I wasn't in the mood for a theological debate.

  Alex caught up with me at the car. He slid into the passenger seat and buckled the seatbelt while I sat there staring at the dash, my forehead resting on the steering wheel. Alex nudged my shoulder. "You don't believe in god either, do you." It wasn't a question.

  "If god were still alive, then I would be normal." I put the car in reverse and slid out of the parking space.

  "I think you're pretty normal. All things considered, I mean. I don't know any other were, so I don't know if you're normal compared to them. But as far as people go, you seem just fine to me. A little bit weird about your CD collection--."

  I growled.

  Alex propped his elbow on the door and leaned against his hand. "Anyhow, you're okay."

  The subject was a man in his early seventies. His daughter had reported him missing when she went to his house to bring him groceries. She had assumed his strange behavior was just part of getting old ñ that his talking to himself and his forgetfulness and occasional violent outbursts were just the start of Alzheimer's disease, and she'd made up her mind that day to talk to him about going to see a doctor. Instead she'd found herself sitting in the police station, giving his description to an officer.

  The woman was tearful, babbling about things that the officer really wasn't concerned with. He just needed a recent photo, a list of people who might have seen him, and places where the old man liked to go. One of the clerks, however, was interested to hear how he'd been doing so well on his own and how proud he was that he could take care of himself. Then a month ago, after they'd been to a flea market, he'd suddenly taken a downturn.

  The clerk (Linda) brought the woman a cup of terrible coffee and whispered to the officer that she would talk to the woman a little and help her calm down. The officer, glad to have someone take the nearly hysterical woman off his hands, said that would be just fine with him. The clerk asked about the flea market. She was an avid flea market shopper she said. What had he bought? The woman thought about it and said that the last thing she remembered him buying was a porcelain dog figurine. She thought it was ugly, but he seemed pleased with it. It wasn't going to be in her house, so she couldn't really complain.

  Then, three days later when she stopped by to drop off some books for him, he'd suddenly gotten old and forgetful. She started visiting him every day after that, to make sure he was eating and bathing and using the bathroom.

  The clerk stopped listening after the part about the figurines, but sat with the woman anyhow, nodding and saying "I see" and "poor dear" in all the right places. Once the woman was calm the clerk sent her back to the officer and then she sent the emails that started the process.

  The text message informing me of a task was the next to last link in the chain. Details were in my email, and after a little checking of on-line maps, I was ready to go.

  Alex fiddled with the radio while I drove. Occasionally he read me directions, complaining about my handwriting. We found our first location and I checked my watch.

  "I shouldn't have let you come with me."

  "Why not?"

  "It's sunrise in about fifteen minutes." I pointed east. "See that?"

  Alex nodded slowly. "I suppose now would be a good time to tell you that I'm not bothered by sunlight, huh?"

  I lit a cigarette and handed it to him after the first drag. "How does that work?"

  "No idea, man." He turned to face me and grinned. "I thought you were keeping me around for research purposes."

  "I could kill you and send you off for research."

  "You'd have to go back to making your own coffee."

  Vampire, one. Werewolf, zero.

  "Do you come from a family of shifters?"

  "I'm the only one in my family. I've been living on my own since I was seventeen because it started to get too difficult to hide what was going on."

  "Teen Wolf." Alex said. "You ever see that movie?"

  "I Was a Teenage Werewolf, you mean?"

  "The one with that guy from television."

  "Yeah, Michael Landon."

  "No, the other one. The one in the eighties."

  "I think we can safely assume I haven't seen it."

  "You don't watch werewolf movies, do you."

  "Do you watch vampire films?"

  "Well, yeah! They're fun! And they're informative. I don't think I would have lived this long if
I didn't have some idea of what was going on and what to do. Everything I learned, I learned from the movies. I mean, there's not exactly anyone around who teaches these things. You can't just look up ëVampire' in the yellow pages and find a teacher. So if you don't watch werewolf movies how did you work things out?"

  "I just made it up as I went alo--" I trailed off as I became aware of the subject making his way down the street, walking directly toward the car. I could smell the demon inside him. "Alex-- can you, like, enchant people?"

  "Like, what do you mean?"

  "Like, calm them. Make them more receptive to something. I mean, what do you do when you're about to feed off someone? You must do something to put them at ease, right?"

  "Yeah, I can do that. Why?"

  "Have you ever ripped a demon out of someone's body?"

  "No, but I can imagine it'd be unpleasant."

  "Exactly. I need you to make sure that man there doesn't freak out and cause a scene."

  Alex licked his lips and nodded. "Easy. Calm him down, you do what you need to do, and then we're out of there."

  "That's it exactly. C'mon." I patted his shoulder and got out of the car. I went through the motions of looking around at the addresses on buildings while Alex walked toward the subject. The subject jerked away and started babbling. It wasn't English and I'm not fluent in demon, but judging by the way he was reacting to Alex, the demon had a pretty good idea that Alex wasn't your average guy. This was not going nice and smooth like I'd hoped it would. I felt the hair on my arms and the nape of my neck stand up and wrote it off as adrenaline.

  Alex put his right hand on the man's chest. The man grew quiet almost instantly and stared at Alex with a look of pain and fear. Alex was pale. "Nicky, hurry. I can't hold this for too long."

  I rushed over to the two of them and we lowered the subject to the ground. Alex backed away to give me room to work. "If I call for an ambulance, how long do you think it'd take them to get here?"

  "Five, maybe ten minutes. I'm not sure. Why?"

  "Because I stopped his heart. I don't want him to suffer from that. How long will this take you?"

  I had already begun the process of finding the demon. I had a small, iron ball pressed against the man's sternum and was just about to begin the chant that would draw the demon out and into the ball. I stopped and looked at Alex. "You did what?"

  "It's okay. I can start it again. It's just that he's old and not in the best health. I'd like to call the paramedics and get them here as fast as possible."

  I tossed my mobile phone to him. "Back up to make the call. I don't want the phone interfering and I don't want you distracting me." Alex made the call and I performed the ritual. The demon was pulled from the man's body and trapped inside the hollow iron ball.

  The pellet shook and rolled in my hand as we stood over the man. The paramedics arrived. The man's daughter arrived. The police arrived. After several cups of coffee from a nearby carryout and repeated statement to the police and medical staff it was determined that he was really lucky that we happened to be in the area when he suffered a heart attack, and that Alex's phone call to emergency services saved his life.

  The man's daughter was grateful. She threw her arms around Alex's neck and kissed him repeatedly. I stood away from them, hands stuffed in my pockets, protecting the iron ball.

  It was nearly mid-day when we arrived at home. I was starving. Alex was dead on his feet. So to speak. He passed out on the couch while I made a sandwich and took it to my room.

  I tossed the iron ball with the demon inside into a jar on my dresser. It held about thirty balls of various sizes. All of them trembled and vibrated with the buzz of tiny, captive demons. The clicking and buzzing lulled me to sleep.

  The next morning, I went to my office to sit around and wait for nothing to happen. The first thing I did was check my bank account. The payment for the exorcism had been deposited. I transferred most of it to my savings account and paid a few bills. Even werewolves need to make sure the utilities are taken care of.

  I turned to research next. Part of my job requires keeping up with the news, sorting out what might be a demon or a vampire or some other occurrence that couldn't be easily attributed to anything "natural" (I refuse to consider myself "supernatural" or "unnatural". I was born this way, so what could be more natural than that?).

  After three hours online and countless websites visited I learned that there were at least six demons at work over in the Dayton area that I'd need to contend with. I found three with little problem. They were clustered together in an abandoned building. I rounded them up and contained them in about two hours.

  Technically, they were poltergeists. They'd taken to throwing bricks at people and cars. The police were certain it was some sort of gang initiation and had been frustrated by repeated attempts to get information from the locals. No one ever saw anyone going in or out of the building, except for the occasional homeless person, and most of them barely had the strength to stand, let alone throw bricks through windshields.

  The others were going to take a little more searching. They didn't seem to be tied to a location, or were tied to something portable. This would take some tracking. I reported the capture of the three poltergeists, did a little more research, and called it a day.

  My research reinforced one very important thing I knew about vampires: most of the information about them is crap. Most people writing about vampires ñ writing "non fiction" about vampires ñ are insane. The discourses on "psychic vampires" and "emotional vampires" and why and how people become vampires were faulty at best and dangerous at its worst. The people claiming to be vampires would probably drop dead of a heart attack if they ever encountered an actual vampire.

  Well. Maybe not any vampire. The unmistakable sound of Madness greeted me when I opened my front door and I found Alex ska dancing in the living room.

  I sighed and sat down on the sofa. It was good having Alex around. I was starting to enjoy having him around. He didn't mind taking care of things around the house, and he had actually made the retrieval process much easier. He was someone I could talk to about things my neighbors wouldn't understand. I didn't have to hide what I was from him. He was in no position to judge me, and his strength meant there was someone around who was capable of controlling me if I ever got carried away in a shift. I was starting to consider this vampire a friend, so maybe I should lighten up a little.

  "And what vampire movies do you suggest?" I asked, grudgingly.

  Alex and I spent nearly ten hours watching movies, interrupted only long enough to use the bathroom and answer the door to accept deliveries of pizza and Chinese. At the end of it I was tired and confused. Alex was bloated and sleepy.

  "I'm no better off than I was before." I yawned and picked a Lo Mein noodle from my shirt.

  "Let me get this straight. You hunt vampires. You kill them. But you know nothing about them?" He hiccupped.

  "It's not like there was a qualifying exam! Anyhow, you defy the rules that I thought I knew. I've watched you put away food covered in garlic. You're not at all bothered by sunlight. The whole running water thing doesn't stop you from taking an hour long shower. For all I know, you could be a practicing Catholic."

  "Lapsed, actually."

  "See!" I stood and threw my hands up in frustration. "Everything I knew is wrong, and all these stupid movies did nothing but give me conflicting information!"

  Alex shrugged and shook his head. "Fun to watch, though. I hadn't seen a couple of those in years."

  "Alex."

  "Nicholas."

  "Are you actually a vampire or are you just some sort of homeless lunatic?"

  He opened and closed his mouth so many times he looked like a goldfish. Then he lunged.

  Enough time had passed since our rumble in the alley that I'd forgotten he had a serious amount of strength packed into his unassuming frame. I often forgot he was a vampire at all. I had put myself in a very dangerous position.

  Alex
was behind me, arms wrapped around my head. It would only take a small gesture for him to snap my neck. His breath was hot against my ear. "If I weren't a vampire you never would have noticed me. We wouldn't be having this little dance right now." His teeth grazed my neck, and then he pushed me away with enough force to send me into the wall. I clamped my hand to the spot where I'd felt his teeth; there was no blood. Not even a welt.