Kitty Rocks the House

Chapter 7

RICK NEVER returned my call that night, and I worried. As I tossed and turned in bed, reaching to the nightstand to check my phone on the off chance I hadn’t heard the ring, Ben kept pointing out that Rick had survived a very long time and could reasonably be expected to take care of himself for the foreseeable future.

“Besides,” he added, “Columban didn’t seem interested in hurting Rick.”

“Then what about those arson cases in Europe? Rick doesn’t know about those and I doubt Columban would tell him.”

He murmured sleepily onto the back of my neck. “Kitty. Relax. Please.”

I tried, honest I did. But I kept waiting for that call, as I watched dawn lighten the sky outside the bedroom window.

Somehow, I got myself to work and made a show of accomplishing something, despite all the potential interviewees who wouldn’t return my calls, press releases I was supposed to be reviewing, messages I should have been answering, my second book that wasn’t writing itself. The file for it glared on my monitor, displaying too much white space.

When my cell phone finally did ring, I dived for it. The prey had revealed itself at last, and I pounced. Even though in the middle of the day, in full sunlight, it couldn’t possibly be Rick, who was holed away in his lair, asleep. I hoped he was.

This call came from Cormac. Maybe he had some good news. I answered, “Yeah?”

“I think I found where your vampire priest is holed up.”

“You did? Where?” If we found Columban, I’d bet we’d find Rick.

“You want to go see?”

“We’re not going to be sneaking up on this guy, are we?”

“It’s the middle of the day, what can he do? I’ll pick you up.”

Twenty minutes later his Jeep was at the curb in front of KNOB. Bag and jacket in hand, I piled into the passenger seat. He drove off without a word.

We’d gone six or seven blocks before I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “So what’d you find?” I asked.

He wore a thin, wry smile. “You gotta ask yourself, if you were a priest, and a vampire, where would you go?”

“I’m not really in the mood for this,” I said.

“It’s pretty funny.”

“Come on? Where?”

He was enjoying himself too much to give the surprise away. I crossed my arms and slouched.

We crossed the freeway into downtown, and he turned from Colfax onto the Auraria campus, a collection of university buildings on a surprisingly pastoral campus for being the middle of downtown Denver. He made a couple of turns into a warren of buildings and parked in a circular drive beside a large, pink church. It had two square, neo-Spanish colonial towers in front; a curved, graceful roofline; gray trim. It must have been almost a century old, and the rest of the city had clearly grown up around it.

“Here it is.”

I pointed at the crosses at the top of the building. “It’s a church.”

“Yup.”

“I thought vampires couldn’t go into churches,” I said. “Consecrated ground and all that.”

“But this one’s not a church anymore. The parish moved out in the seventies, and it’s been used as an auditorium ever since. There’s a dinosaur museum in the basement.”

So, where do you go to find a vampire priest? A deconsecrated church. Of course. I chuckled. “Well, that’s cute.”

He opened the door and climbed out.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I called, scrambling out of my side of the Jeep. “You can’t go staking him or anything. Rick’ll kill us.”

He glanced at me sidelong, and I growled under my breath.

“I’m only guessing he’s here,” he said. “A vampire isn’t going to leave a trail or reveal himself unless he wants to. Nothing’s better at hiding than they are. But you’ve seen it before—don’t look for the vampire, look for what he’s using to protect himself. I made a list of likely places and started visiting them, and I found something.”

We walked around to the back of the building, to a quiet space by a house connected to the church—the former rectory. A row of shrubs and a flower garden, daffodils nodding and lilacs filling the air with a heady smell, sheltered the space from the foot traffic on the sidewalk.

Cormac knelt on the ground, and I knelt with him, watching. He pulled items out of his pockets and arranged them on the lawn in front of him, which meant he was going to work a spell. Or, Amelia was. Because of her, I never knew what Cormac was going to draw from his figurative hat next. His pockets always had arcane bits and pieces in them.

He picked up a stub of a red candle, the wick already blackened; a sprig of some herb; and a piece of black twine. He wrapped the herb to the candle with the twine, then lit the candle using a cheap lighter, which seemed wrong somehow. A real wizard ought to be able to spark it out of thin air, right? But I’d hung around with enough magicians over the last few years to know the answer to that: you don’t waste magic on something you can do without it. The cheap lighter ignited the candle’s wick just fine.

Cormac’s lips moved, mouthing words. He stepped forward, toward the church wall, holding the candle in front of him, its flame wavering with the movement. About twenty steps away, the yellow drop of fire went out. The air was still, but a stray breeze might have extinguished it. I looked around, as if expecting to find that some invisible person nearby had blown it out.

He backed up, and the candle flared to life again. He walked a little ways farther down, following the line of an invisible circle, moved toward the building—and again the flame died. He tried it two or three more times, and each time he crossed that invisible threshold, the candle went out, or relit.

“That’s really weird,” I said, unnecessarily.

“Yeah, Amelia saw markings, there and there.” He pointed to black squiggly marks, one on a corner of the church, another on a nearby tree, and a third on the back of a NO PARKING sign near the street. I’d have figured they were random graffiti tags, if I noticed them at all. But now that he’d pointed them out, they had a pattern—pairs of stylized letters, medieval alchemical or zodiac signs maybe.

I tried to visualize what the candle told us was there in spirit. “Someone cast a protective circle here,” I said. “Protecting against what?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Cormac said. “May be nothing. May be a habit of his.”

“You’re sure it’s Rick’s vampire friend that did it?”

“Because we don’t know any other vampires who are magicians, right?”

My shoulders unconsciously bunched up, an imitation of hackles rising. He was talking about Roman, who’d spent part of his two thousand years as a vampire learning how to work magic. Guy could do it all.

“Are you saying Columban is with Roman?”

“I’m just saying that vampires and magic aren’t mutually exclusive. And that this guy knows how to cover his ass and doesn’t seem to need any help doing it. The symbols are European, medieval—it’s what I’d expect from a vampire working for the Vatican.”

“So he’s a vampire Catholic priest and a magician. I’d have assumed those would all be mutually exclusive.”

“I don’t think we can make any assumptions. Guy’ll do what he needs to do.”

Didn’t really make the situation any better.

Cormac continued, “This is just a defense against a supernatural threat. Won’t stop someone with a stake, if it comes to that.”

“He may have mundane servants for that,” I said. “So no, we’re not staking him. This is Rick’s problem.” For now. I really had to let him know about Hardin’s police sketch.

“We know where he’s most likely staying, now. We can keep an eye on him.”

That would have to be enough. I looked over the building. It probably had a basement or cellar, or at the very least a windowless utility closet, locked and protected. People moved around here all day, never knowing about the vampires lurking here.

We returned to the Jeep. I mulled possibilities. Not knowing what to expect next made planning ahead difficult. Was Columban worried about something specific? Did I need to be worried about it, too? Or was this a general precaution? I asked, “Would a protective circle like that work if the church were still consecrated? Still a church, I mean?”

“If it were still a church you wouldn’t need the circle. But then, the vampire wouldn’t be there.”

Maybe that was why Columban did it, and for no other reason. He couldn’t use a real church, but he could make a facsimile of one.

Cormac asked, “If Rick decides to go with this guy and leave Denver, what are you going to do?”

I couldn’t imagine such a thing. Rick leaving Denver—Rick was Denver. He’d been around since before there was a Denver. He couldn’t leave Denver. I almost blurted the words, unthinking. But Columban represented something Rick thought he lost centuries ago. I remembered the way he looked that night, as if the universe had rearranged itself around him.

“Try to talk him out of it?” I said. I honestly didn’t know what I’d do if Rick left. Try to be happy for him.

I had a bigger question. We were supposed to be working to oppose Roman together. The only way this whole opposition thing worked is if Rick and I were in it together. If Rick left to become some kind of vampire priest, I’d be on my own. Would vampires like Nasser even listen to me, then?

“You should know,” I said. “Hardin’s looking for this guy, too.”

“I’m not telling her about this,” Cormac said, with the contempt he held for all cops.

“That’s what I thought. I need to hold her off until I can get ahold of Rick.”

“She won’t hear it from me.”

Cormac drove me back to work, waiting until we were in the parking lot at KNOB to ask, “Heard there’s a new werewolf in town.”

I looked at him, startled. “How do you know about him?”

“Keep my eyes open, that’s all.”

Cormac hadn’t been at New Moon last night, I was sure of it. Had Ben told him? “Are you spying on us? On New Moon?”

“Like I said, just keeping my eyes open. So, how’s that going?”

I slouched in the seat and growled. “It’s fine, everything’s fine,” I said, noncommittal. He gave me a sidelong look.

“When’s full moon, Saturday? He going with you?”

“What, you thinking of tagging along, just in case?”

“I could.”

I glared at him. “And how exactly would you accomplish that? You think you’re going to dig some of your silver bullets out of storage and sit on a hillside playing sniper?” That was exactly the kind of thing he’d have done in the old days, before his time in prison. Now, as an ex-con, handling firearms could get him thrown back into prison. Ben and I seemed to treat the threat more seriously than he did. Or he was purposefully pulling our chains. I would never know. “No. We’ll be fine.”

“You change your mind, call.”

“We can handle it. This is normal pack stuff. Everything’s fine.”

“You keep saying that.”

He was worried. This was his way of saying he was worried. So I didn’t snap back at him. This time, instead of saying everything would be just fine, nothing to worry about, I said, “If we need you, we’ll call.” Which was all anybody wanted to hear from family in the end, wasn’t it?

“GOOD EVENING, this is Kitty Norville and in case you didn’t know, you’re listening to The Midnight Hour. Cutting edge, controversial, and all that good stuff. I know what you tune in for, and I’m here to make sure you leave happy. Tonight I’ve got a couple of guests on the show, calling in from their respective offices to discuss with me a brand-new book making the rounds: In the Blood, a memoir by a guy named Edward Alleyn. That’s Edward Alleyn, vampire, in what might be the first widely published vampire memoir ever. I should also mention that the author claims to be Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor who starred in the great plays of Christopher Marlowe, which means he’s been alive for some four hundred years, and he wants to tell us all about it. The book is stirring up a lot of heated discussion in some quarters. It’s been called a window into the Elizabethan age, as well as the century’s lamest hoax. What do you think? Have you read the book, and was it really written by a four-hundred-year-old vampire celebrity, or is it some ghost writer’s shameless bid for publicity? I’ve found a historian and a literary scholar who’ve both read the book and have come to different conclusions about the author’s claims. For all our edifications, I’ve brought them here to discuss.”

Now, I knew very well that the book really was by Edward Alleyn, vampire, who really was the Elizabethan actor. These days, he was Master of London, and I’d stayed with him last year when I traveled to the city for the First International Conference on Paranatural Studies. I was the one who talked him into writing the thing, and I read an advance copy to give him a nice glowing review. Not that he needed it. He’d sparked enough publicity all on his own to hit the bestseller list in the first week of release. This was without doing any kind of promotion, public appearances, interviews, or anything. That was his condition for doing the book—that he could remain in the shadows, out of the public eye, as he’d done since his “death” in 1626. Plenty of controversy could be generated without his direct participation, though, and I had a feeling he was enjoying the show from the safety of one of his sumptuous manor houses.

“Professor Sean Eret is a historian from the University of Michigan, and he’ll start us off. Welcome to the show, Dr. Eret.” Eret had written articles defending the book, and I was looking forward to hearing from him.

“Thank you for inviting me. This should prove energizing.”

“Lay it out for me: you believe the author of In the Blood is telling the truth and really is the actor Edward Alleyn turned vampire.”

He had a pleasant, rumbly professor voice. Like he ought to be sitting in a big comfy chair by an old-fashioned fireplace. I chose to imagine him so. “It’s not outside the realm of reason that this book is a work of fiction. But if it is, a ridiculous amount of historical research went into its creation. Alleyn has details here that most historians have never even thought to research. The names of Queen Elizabeth’s hounds and falcons, for example. He’s right, by the way, and I had to call in favors at the British Library to check. It’s astonishing.”

“So the historical accuracy was enough to convince you?” I said.

“It’s impressive all on its own, but there’s so much more to the book than that. It’s the personality of it.”

“You want to explain what you mean by that?”

“Facts, historical detail, no matter how obscure, can be researched. But the author of this book has managed to take on the mind-set of a person living in that time and place. The chapters dealing with his early life—they’re exquisite. It’s difficult for a modern author, no matter how diligent, to replicate the historical mind without some kind of judgment or commentary on that time as history. Alleyn is so comfortable with the biases and prejudices of a man from that time and place, I’m very much inclined to believe his claims.”

“The gossip about Shakespeare and Marlowe doesn’t hurt, either,” I said.

“If the anti-Stratfordians won’t take the word of Edward Alleyn that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I’m not sure there’s any hope for them.”

“I think I have to agree with you, sir,” I said. “This sounds like a fine time to bring on my second guest, to offer a counterpoint. Professor Amanda McAdams, who teaches literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and has written extensively on Elizabethan drama, thank you for joining us.”

“Thank you,” she said, brusque and businesslike.

“I know you have your own thoughts about In the Blood and its author.”

“Yes, I do. Professor Eret has been fooled by a very convincing piece of fiction,” she said. “All those facts, those details he praises—they can be researched and constructed. All the cross-referencing with secondary sources in the world will just tell you what the author used for source material. Even if the man himself came forward and allowed himself to be interviewed, and even if he does turn out to be a vampire, what proof do we have that he’s really Edward Alleyn the actor? Birth certificate? Driver’s license? I don’t think so.”

“What proof would convince you that this book really was written by the Elizabethan Edward Alleyn, Professor McAdams?”

“That’s just it, I don’t believe this book could possibly have been written by someone from the Elizabethan era. There’s no hint of historical idioms in the writing, of Elizabethan uses of language. The facts and mind-set within the writing may be historically accurate, as Dr. Eret says. But that’s just a matter of research and careful characterization. The syntax of the writing itself is that of a modern author.”

“That shouldn’t be at all surprising,” Eret interjected. “This isn’t time travel, the book didn’t land on us straight from 1620. It was written by someone living in the modern world for a modern audience. Well, perhaps ‘living’ isn’t the right word.”

I remembered something Ned said about accents. That a vampire who lived for a long time had to change his accent if he wanted to continue to blend in with the world around him. Language didn’t stagnate. Rick was born in sixteenth-century Spain, but he sounded like a modern American. Ned himself cultivated a modern, dramatic voice that was probably quite different than the one he’d used on stage during his prime.

Smiling at the microphone I said, “Am I right in thinking that both of you are writing scholarly essays either refuting or defending the book?”

“My refutation has already been published online,” Professor McAdams said. “I’ll be happy to write a rebuttal of any published statement Professor Eret cares to make on the subject.”

“My essay is appearing in The New Yorker next month,” Professor Eret said.

I could imagine the glares they’d be exchanging if I’d had them both in the studio. I almost wished I’d been able to arrange it. I moved the conversation on. “What if I said I’d met the author and I’m absolutely certain his claims are true? He really is Edward Alleyn, the actor, and now vampire. I mean, he’s got a near-mint First Folio sitting in his living room.”

Professor McAdams said, “All you need to get a First Folio is a lot of money. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“He quoted Marlowe from memory.”

“Any decent actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company can do that,” she added.

Eret said, “This man you met, who claims to be Edward Alleyn—is he involved in the theater at all? I notice that this memoir deals very little with his life currently.”

“He’s protective of his privacy,” I said. “But I believe he owns at least a couple of West End theaters.”

“You see, that rings true to me. The original Edward Alleyn made his fortune in the theater and in spectacle. I have to believe that some of that impulse would still exist. But more than anything I offer this: of all the historical figures a vampire could claim to be, why on earth would anyone pick an Elizabethan actor who, apart from appearing as a secondary character in a popular film a dozen years ago, is virtually unknown to anyone outside the field? If this is a wild bid for attention, why not impersonate Walter Raleigh or Francis Drake, or even Shakespeare himself? If you’re trying to be famous, impersonating a celebrity hardly anyone remembers is not the way to go about it.”

When she didn’t respond right away, I prompted McAdams. “Professor? What do you think about that?”

“I have to admit, you have a point there.” She sounded thoughtful rather than disappointed.

Eret said, “Then you concede—I’m right, and the memoir is real.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. “There’s still a reputation to be made in establishing myself as the professional skeptic on the topic.”

I said, “All right, level with me—that’s why the Shakespeare debate’s still out there, isn’t it?”

“Because there are people who are professional skeptics on the topic? Of course.”

“Well, I have to respect your honesty, at least.”

Eret said, “Professor McAdams, would you be interested in staging a series of public debates on the subject?”

“That’s a wonderful idea. Maybe we could even co-present at the next MLA conference?”

“Splendid! Each of us ought to be able to get a book or two out of this. Are you tenured yet?”

“No—I could really use a high-profile book. Maybe even for a popular audience…”

“Then a formal rivalry could help both our careers,” Eret said cheerfully.

Are you kidding me? I wondered if they even remembered that I was here. “You guys do realize you’re still on the air, right?” They both made polite affirmative noise. “Do I dare ask about any conclusions on the subject of In the Blood and its author?”

“We’ll obviously never be able to come to some kind of consensus,” McAdams pronounced decisively. Nay, happily even.

“Right then. Thank you both for speaking with me this evening. I’m going to wrest control of my own show back and open the line for a couple of questions. Hello, Arthur from Spokane.”

“Hi, yes, I just wanted to say that you really can’t be so cavalier in dismissing the argument that the front man purportedly known as William Shakespeare did not write those plays. The actor Edward Alleyn may not have even been aware of the cover-up, as many contemporaries were not—that’s why it’s called a cover-up—”

God, I really needed to check the monitor more closely. “I’m sorry, that’s a little off topic tonight. Can you tell me if you think Edward Alleyn is really a vampire?”

“Well, of course he is, if he says he is.”

And yet Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare. I stared at the microphone. “Seriously? You’re going to stick with that?”

He sounded offended. “Well, yes, and if I could get back to the question of Shakespeare—”

“No, you can’t. Next caller, please, and let’s stay on topic. Hello?”

“Oh, Kitty, hi! I just have a quick question—do you think maybe that Shakespeare is a vampire?”

I had to think about that a minute. No, I needed to think about that for several minutes. But I didn’t have a few minutes. I had the threat of dead air and a sudden wish that I had done this week’s show on the possibility of psychic houseplants. “No, I don’t. And I think it’s about time to break for station ID and go have a drink. Or three…”