Between Jobs
by Lakan David D. Inocencio
Genre Card Used: Fantasy
Archetype Cards Used: The Tomboy and The Dandy
Keywords: Blood, Dragon, Fan, Old Photograph, Wings, and Sacrifice.
“Look, it’s not that difficult. I don’t want the fries, I do want the drink, and I don’t want the extra bells and whistles.”
“But, but sir, there are no complementary bells or whistles with this meal.”
Blank stare. That’s all I’m able to do. Maybe a twitch around the eyes, but that’s it. My hand inches slowly into my pocket to pull out the bracelet of dead men’s hair that I carry around. Using it, I can punch supernatural baddies with the force of an artillery shell. My other hand, the far more sensible one, quickly grabs the impulsive one and gives it a stern dressing down before sending it to its room to sulk.
“Kid, all I want, is a bloody burger. I don’t want anything else. Just. Give. Me. My. Burger.”
“Sir, our burgers are extremely well done.”
“What.”
“You said–“
“I swear if you tell me that you actually think I want them rare because I said “bloody burger”, so help me, I will whip you silly with a soggy piece of lettuce so hard that you’ll bleed mustard.”
His turn for a blank stare. Come on, I know you’re thinking it, go ahead and say something about lettuce not being able to draw blood. Go on. I triple-dog dare you. Nyah, nyah, nyah.
Instead, he does the smart thing and calls one of his co-workers over. At least she’s smarter-looking than pimply face. And significantly prettier.
She comes over to the register with a rather disgruntled look and says, “Sir, I apologize for the delay, if I could just… Jem? Is that you?”
What. No one has called me “Jem” since…
“Alice?”
“Jem! It is you! You haven’t aged a day!”
It’s true, I haven’t. Best to play it cool though.
“You know ush rugged typesh, onshe we hit a shertain age, we shtop aging to presherve our looksh.”
She laughs, “Still trying for debonair, huh Jeremiah? You should know, there’s more to Connery than slurring your esses.”
I chuckle, true that. Cripes, but she’s still beautiful. Long straight black hair, with those amazing brown eyes. She’s more worn and tired than the last I saw her but still has that life about her. She was always willing to go out and do whatever, be it baking a cake or throwing down in a rugby match.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again, here of all places.”
“You and me both, well, I’m–“
“Getting back to work!”
Both of us look up to see the manager: a fat, ugly man covered in enough oily sweat to fry the burgers in.
“I don’t pay you to chat people up, I pay you to work, dammit! Now, hop to it, or you’re fired!”
She smirks at me and in typical Alice fashion says, “Screw it, I quit.” and hops over the counter before taking my arm and leading me to the door. She even grabs one of those hats for parties with the little cartoon knight fighting a dragon on it. I laugh as we leave.
We’re a couple of blocks down when she speaks, “So, what’ve you been up to, Jem?”
“Oh, you know, this and that. How about you? Last I saw you was at that party.”
“Where you vanished.”
Oh, yeah. Crap, I’d forgotten that. “Yeah…”
“You just left Jem.”
“Yeah… that is a thing that I did…”
“You know what that does to you at that age? I was eighteen, fresh-faced and new to life, charmed by this rakish and debonair rogue, swept away and off my feet. Then one day, he vanishes leaving nothing behind but some old booze and a few photographs.”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry about that.”
Silence. It was ten years ago, not much for me, but for her… gods below, must’ve been terrible.
“Yeah, well, it’s all in the past Jem. I moved on, and I’m sure you did. So, what have you really been up to? Still hanging around young, nubile, college girls, trying to charm them with your puerile wit?”
And she smiles at me, a kind, sad smile, almost saying that everything is forgiven. It all comes back, the falling in love, the giddiness; and I wish I’d had the guts to stay. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get attached. I’m Jeremiah Greene, and getting attached gets you killed in my line of work. And, if I’m really honest with myself, I just couldn’t watch her die with age while I kept going.
“You know me, life on the move, never in one place for long, places to be, people to meet, and… oh, bugger it all… No, haven’t done any of that. Just been scraping things together mostly. Between jobs now, but I’m getting by. You?”
“Well, I just quit a crappy job.” She smirks at me. “Did it after running into an old boyfriend who dumped me ten years ago.”
“Really? He must’ve be a real jerk.”
She chuckles and says, “No, he was pretty sweet. Always kind and gentle, but he also had that sense of danger and excitement about him, like being with him was a great big adventure. But then he was gone.”
Both of us keep walking in silence for a few minutes, then I say: “And I’m sure you’d like to know why he left?”
“No, I already know why.”
Hah, probably something she’s seen on Doctor what’s-his-name on TV. But then again, this is Alice, and she’s always been smarter than most.
“You didn’t want to see me get older.”
What.
She is smarter than all the rest. But… No, play it cool, Jeremiah.
“What makes you say that?”
She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me with that same sad smile. And it’s there in her eyes, more than the life that burns, it’s that fiery desire to see all the world has to offer and to experience everything that she can. To someone like me, it was seeing the world again for the first time. But now, there’s more to that fire. It’s dimmer, and it’s changed with the years, but that same brilliance still burns. Now though, there’s frost as well, creeping towards the fire, ringing that beauty with sadness. And it drives blades through my heart knowing I was responsible for some of that.
We come to a fountain and take a seat. There aren’t too many people around at the moment, just one person on the other side, but that’s not too surprising for a weekday.
We sit there for a while, not looking at one another yet. I don’t know when it happened, but we’re holding hands as if those ten years never happened.
Then she speaks:
“You still in the monster-killing business then?”
Crap, alarm bells, sirens, everything goes off at once.
I let go and jump up from where I’m sitting, nearly falling on my ass after tripping over my feet. It’s unconscious thought, the bracelet is on and I’m scrambling for a pinch of salt. Dozens of enchantments spring to mind, ready to unleash at a moment’s notice. Here? In broad daylight? They wouldn’t be stupid enough to attack me now, would they? Whoever “they” might be.
Alice looks startled, if not a bit amused. “Jem? What’s wrong?”
“Who are you? How did you find me?”
“Jem, it’s me, Alice.”
“Yeah, sure. What’s the plan? Seduce me? Lure me in? Get me into bed then kill me? Smart, but not smart enough! Eat salt!”
I throw the pinch at her with all the force I can muster into less than a gram of the stuff.
Of course, the wind would pick just that moment to change, getting every single blasted grain into my eyes. My reaction isn’t as severe as that of the majority of the supernatural nasties I encounter. I’m mostly human so it’s mostly a human reaction, much the same as anyone getting stinging crystals of stinging pain caught in their bloody stinging eyes. I’m blinded, and I have no idea where to strike. Funny. The great Jeremiah Greene, was finally killed by some two-bit shape-shifter just because the wind shifted at the wrong time.
I feel hands on me, and I’m about to lash out when some water splashes into my face. She’s holding me, helping me up where I can better wash my eyes. She’s not killing me yet for some reason. A rather devious little changeling this bugger is…
“Jem? Are you all right?”
“Sod off! Who are you? Who sent you?”
“Jeremiah, look, it’s me. Well, don’t look, your eyes are still burning, but listen, I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m me.”
“Bollocks, I never told Alice anything, and she wouldn’t ask me a question like that. You know who I am, so who sent you?”
“Jem, calm down. Listen, I’ll step back and let you recover.”
My eyesight is clearing, and I can see that she has stepped back to let me recover. Whoever she, or it, is, is a really clever little bugger. And she, or it, really knows how to push my buttons. She, or– There needs to be a gender-neutral word for ‘she’ and ‘it’…
…
…
‘shit’? No, that’s terrible. ‘She’ then, for now.
She is far more dangerous than I thought.
“If you’re really Alice, then why would you ask me that?”
“Because I’ve had ten years of trying to find you. Because when asking in the right places, your name is a big one. And because, I think you should be coming after me soon.”
Silence.
It’s not so much “awkward” silence as it is a more uncomfortable and infinitely worse type of silence. “Awkward” silence implies embarrassment, or social wrong-way-rubbing that this situation doesn’t have. This has more of what you’d get after finding out that your dog was secretly in love with your pet goldfish, that said goldfish was a communist spy and the dog was working for MI7 as 00-nothing. It just throws a monkey wrench, held by an actual monkey, into your mental gears.
“Jem?”
Nope, still blank.
“Jem, are you ok?”
“Alice?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“What do you mean I should be coming after you soon?”
“May I sit?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, go ahead.”
She sits down. Gods, she really is a beauty.
“What’s this all about then? You’re really are ‘Alice’ aren’t you?”
“Yes Jem, I am. After you left, I spent months trying to figure out where you went. And months after that depressed. I thought we had something, but that was teenager talk I suppose. Recently, I’d been trying to find someone who could help me with something, and it just turned out to be you.”
“You’ve found me, what do you need?”
“I… I need you to kill someone for me.”
“What? Why?”
“First, you need to tell me some things before I can trust you.”
“Alice, it’s me, you know you can trust me.”
“The way I can trust you to stay.”
Oh yeah, crap.
“Fine, that’s fair. What do you want to know?”
“Not want, Jem, need. The first is, am I right about why you left?”
Crap again. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“So just how old are you then? You look, 30? 35? I know you’re older than that, everyone I’ve talked to about you has said that you’re immortal?”
“Haven’t been celebrating any birthdays recently, but last I checked, it was around a decade over a century.”
She pauses. Ok, now this is awkward silence.
“So… you mean ten years ago, I was a teenager going out with a centenarian?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that make you a dirty old–“
“Yes.”
“And, all those times–“
“Yes.”
“Even when you–“
“Yes.”
“Oh. That’s a lot to take in.”
I can’t resist it, I’ll probably shoot myself for this, but what the hell. “That’s what she said!” And I snicker to myself. I am solidly in touch with my thirteen-year-old self.
She just gives me a raised eyebrow.
“Heh, sorry. Ahem. Well, what else do you need to know?”
“Right. What is it you do? All I’ve learned is that you can’t be killed and that you hunt monsters?”
“Well, I’m not quite, ‘immortal’, more like… A delayed mortal. Maybe ‘undead’ would be a less ambiguous, if slightly inaccurate, definition I guess. First died in World War II, entered strange events and a few secret handshakes, and now I work for a deity of death as his mortal champion.”
“Jem, you used to make fun of all the occult witch-crafty-type people.”
“Heh, yeah, well, they’re phonies. I’m real. Basically, I track down anyone who’s on this side of life that shouldn’t be here, and I send them back. Simple as that. Granted, I usually have to shoot them a few times first, but it’s part of the job.”
“So you’re some sort of hitman psychopomp.”
I think back to that meeting at Stacy’s bar the other week and smile, “Well, not in the strictest sense of the word, but I do transport souls to the afterlife, so yeah, something like that.”
“Could you transport my soul?”
What.
“Alice, why would I want to do something like that?”
She sighs, as if bracing herself for something really big, and painful. Like telling someone that you’re really Jack the Ripper in disguise, or you were abducted by aliens and turned into an extraterrestrial bioweapon, or that you secretly idolized Vanilla Ice and had a life-sized poster of his in your room.
She speaks, “Crap, I feel so silly saying this. Do you believe in vampires?”
I raise my eyebrow and say, “Well, yeah. Currently taking care of an exiled vampire noble, actually. She’s twelve, a sweet kid, but quite aggravating sometimes. She’s back at my apartment now, probably reading Dostoevsky again. Precocious little brat.”
She laughs and says. “Going after them that young, Jem? Shame on you.”
Then she looks away, staring up at the sun. “Do you know what a Tlahuelpuchi is, Jem?”
Gods below… Thos are some of the nastier things I’ve encountered. Born like humans, but they get worse as they grow older. They’re not mindless like the lesser vampires, nor are they immortal like the greater ones. They can be killed by violence or by age, but not by any of the other ‘traditional’ vampire killers. And other than increased strength when hunting and the shape-shifting, that’s it. And the insanity. It’s gradual, but it never fails. Bloodthirsty insanity.
“I’ve encountered them before. And… you’re one? You didn’t seem to want to suck my blood when we were together.”
“It manifests later for us. I didn’t start having cravings or getting any abilities until a couple of years after you left. Now, I can even do this.”
A moment later there’s a white cat where she was sitting. Another, and she’s back. If I weren’t still in a state of shock, I’d have fallen over again.
“Cripes, Alice…”
She gives me a sad smile and then says, “I don’t do it often. Makes the hunger worse.”
I lean forward, holding my head in my hands. Bollocks, but this is a mess…
“Did you… did you ever…?”
She doesn’t meet my gaze, instead looking straight ahead. “I had a roommate a couple years back. I thought I had it controlled, thought I wouldn’t go mad like others. She was a good person, didn’t know anything about the supernatural.” She laughs then, a short, bitter laugh. “Reminded me of myself from before. I didn’t know any of this until years after I met you. Then, one night, the hunger just got so bad that… oh God…”
I move closer and put my arm around her, holding her close. She doesn’t cry. Alice never cries, she’s always burnt too brightly with life for tears to ever touch her it seems, but now the facade is cracking and all I can do is hold her.
She continues, “The police thought it was a burglary gone bad… I couldn’t say anything, they wouldn’t have understood. I had to leave, wound up here, away from everyone I know. Except for you. Please, Jem, will you help me?”
I keep my arm around her, feeling her warmth and the beating of her heart. No tears. I say, “There’s no cure for it, and to really be free of it, you’d have to… well, die.”
“That’s what I’m asking, Jeremiah.”
“Alice, I can’t do that. When it’s some crazy out there killing innocents, that I can do, but… I loved you, Alice, I don’t think I can kill you.”
“And what happens when I do turn into some crazy out there killing innocents? It’s just a matter of time.”
And I’m quiet again, but not for very long. I release her and hold her hand tight. “There’s another thing. Usually, vampires transmit by biting, transfer of blood, you know the story. Tlahuelpuchi though, you can’t transmit it. Or rather, you can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are only two ways to become a Tlahuelpuchi, first, it’s to be born to it. The second, is to kill a Tlahuelpuchi.”
She processes that for a moment, and in a single word that speaks volumes, she says, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“So you can’t kill me, without becoming me.”
“Something like that.”
Then a voice behind us, rich, deep, and gentle, “No, he can’t. But I can.”
Crap. Of course he’d show up right about now, wouldn’t he? Alice turns around to look at the speaker, but I already know what she’s going to see. The whole, tall, dark, and handsome shebang. I hate the bastard, but, just this once, I think I may need him.
He comes into view. Must’ve been the bloke on the other side of the fountain from us. He’s wearing a black tux as he often does these days. There’s a white flower in his pocket, a rose, carnation, or something. His hair is tied back with a black silk ribbon, making him look like Antonio Banderas from that one movie. And he’s holding onto some silly little Chinese fan, keeping himself cool even though no sort of temperature can affect him.
“Good day, Jeremiah, and good day, Alicia.”
Alice is wide-eyed, I forget that on first meeting him, mortals find themselves overwhelmed. He has this presence about him, like what you get when seeing a massive mountain range or the ocean for the first time. There’s this feeling of absolute and unquestionable power. Everyone knows someone similar, someone who can command attention and respect just by walking into a room. With him, it’s even more than that, exponentially more. It’s that absolute certainty of his existence. Him and taxes as the saying goes.
“Who are you?”
He smiles. It’s strange, when I see it directed at others, it seems kind, gentle, almost loving even. When he smiles at me though, it seems patronizing, infuriating, just short of mocking even.
“I am a friend to all those in need, those who are suffering and in pain, the very old and the too young, all will know me sooner or later, and I know all who are, were, and will be.”
She’s in utter awe, “Are you… are you an angel?”
I bark out a bitter laugh. An angel my bloody left foot.
“He’s no angel, think about it for a second. It’ll come to you.”
She does. And it does.
“What, what do you I have to do?”
“Just take my hand.”
“Damn it, you can’t just take her! There’s got to be another way, she’s got her whole life ahead of her!”
None of us say anything, but my anger can still be felt in the air. And Alice’s sadness.
I sigh.
“I’m sorry. Alice, it’s your choice. Don’t let a dirty old centenarian keep you back.”
She nods and leans over to kiss me on the cheek. She presses something into my hand and then stands, giving me one final sad smile. She takes hold of his hand and with a light wind, they’re both gone.
I wait for a few moments, and then he reappears alone.
“Are you all right, Jeremiah?”
“Sod off and die in your own piss.”
“Ah, typical wit. She’s at peace now, Jeremiah, no more hunger, no pain, nothing. She’s had to live with that for over a decade. And you know the worst part, it’s not just any blood her kind thirsts for.”
“That of the newly born.” I reply.
“Yes.”
“May I sit?”
“Sod off and die in your own piss.”
“You’ve already used that, Jeremiah, but I’ll take it as a yes.”
He sits down without a word. He reaches into a bag he’s been carrying and offers me a doughnut, but I refuse. Looks tasty but I’m not really in any mood for food.
“What’s that she gave you, Jeremiah?”
Oh yeah, that. I open my hand and unfold the paper there. It’s a coupon. For a free burger.
It doesn’t take much more than that and I break down into tears.
END
About Lakan David D. Inocencio
Mr. Inocencio is a full-time freelance writer, occasional D&D dungeon master, perpetually aspiring novelist, and imaginary Emperor of his own little Imperial Realm. He enjoys urban fantasy, noir, hard-boiled pulp, Lovecraftian horror, candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach, non sequitur humor, and puns. Further, for some reason, he enjoys talking in the third person, claiming that such is the logical extension of the royal “we”, calling it the imperial “him”.