Chapter Four Reginald

FOUR

Excerpt from The Annals of Vampyric Lore , Seventeenth Edition

“Index of Notable Historical Events,” p. 1193

The arson that has since become widely known as The Incident is believed to have occurred on the evening of October 22, 1872, at a party held at the Sevastopol estate of Count Wyatt Contesque. While accounts from the party’s survivors provide an inconsistent picture of events, most agree on three points:

One: The Incident did, in fact, occur, and was the nastiest arson-related vampire murder any person present had ever witnessed.

Two: The morning after The Incident , several items believed to belong to Mr. Reginald Cleaves (see: Index of Notorious Vampires , pp. 1123–24) and a bombastic note believed to have been written by same were found on the premises.

Three: Due to a lack of any other clues, many believe Reginald Cleaves was the arsonist.

No formal legal action has been taken against Cleaves to date because most in the vampiric legal community agree the evidence against him is circumstantial at best. Furthermore, a small, if vocal, minority of survivor accounts insist the whole affair had been nothing but a product of the Count’s vivid imagination after he’d consumed blood spiked with hallucinogens.

Despite this, Cleaves’s name remains linked with The Incident in popular imagination. The Collective (See: The Collective, infra., 982–83) remains committed to bringing him to justice as retribution for the murder of their sires (colloquially known as “The Founding Eight”), many of whom attended Count Wyatt Contesque’s party and were among the number counted as missing.

For a list of Vampires believed to have perished in The Incident , please refer to Appendix IX.

Reginald

I knew something was wrong the minute I got home.

I didn’t know how they’d gotten in. They shouldn’t have been able to get in. The prohibition against vampire breaking and entering was as ingrained in our DNA as our desire for blood. It meant we couldn’t enter someone’s home without express permission from the people who lived there.

Or at least, that’s what it should have meant.

I’d always been uncannily prescient, even when human. The last time the hairs on the back of my neck had prickled hot like this had been seconds before The Collective’s sires had turned me, and most of the other people in my village, into the vampires we ultimately became, changing the trajectory of my existence forever.

I flipped on my kitchen light and turned slowly in a circle, trying to take everything in. But even though all my synapses were firing, every instinct screaming at me to run , no one was there. And nothing seemed out of place. There was the pot I used to warm my meals from the North Shore blood bank, soaking in the sink where I’d left it hours ago. There was my glockenspiel in its usual spot on the bookshelf, my one remaining tie to the human man I’d once been.

And there was my most prized possession: a framed oil painting of Edward Cullen on the wall above the sink, sparkly and magnificent as he gazed moodily into the middle distance.

(I didn’t care what Frederick thought about Twilight . I fucking loved Edward Cullen. To be able to read minds? Epic. Not for the first time, I wondered if the Berkeley stoner who sold me the painting fifteen years ago actually believed it when she’d said the painting’s sparkles were magic.)

I grabbed the serrated knife from my knife block and clutched it in both hands. It was an admittedly frivolous purchase when I got it, given that I didn’t need to slice my food, but I was glad I had it as I crept forward into the hallway, flicking on light switches as I went. I tried tapping into the rage that fueled many of the bigger mistakes I’d made in my first century as a vampire to keep my fear at bay, but it was difficult.

I’d changed a lot since those early years.

I liked to think I was a reasonably intelligent person, but despite my build, I wasn’t an especially strong one. My only reliable natural defense were my fangs, but those obviously wouldn’t be much help against the idiots chasing me. They were vampires, too. A nice pointy wooden stake would have been great just then, but I tended not to keep them around for obvious, not-a-fan-of-suicide reasons.

It wasn’t until I went into my bedroom and switched on the light that I found what it was they’d done.

My blood turned even colder in my veins than it already was at the sight of the three-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Count von Count from Sesame Street , standing beside the head of my bed, looking as comfortable in his surroundings as if he lived there. He was purple and Muppety, with wide unseeing eyes and a permanent grin splitting his face. He stood with one three-finger hand extended in front of him, as though he’d been in the middle of counting something important when they’d captured his likeness.

For all I knew, he had been.

I hadn’t seen Sesame Street since the late 1970s. Did Count von Count still get airtime? Not that I cared. I knew enough about the modern world to recognize a Muppet when I saw one, but certainly didn’t follow their careers.

The bigger question was: What was he doing in here?

I searched my bedroom for something that might explain this. But all I found that hadn’t been there that morning was the cardboard Count and my own growing sense of panic.

When I turned to face my closet, I saw the note.

They’d attached it to my closet door by means of a wooden arrow shot straight through it. It had only four words, scrawled in big blocky red capital letters with what looked like blood for ink:

WE WILL BE BACK

Oh, shit.

With difficulty, I removed the note and the arrow from the door. It left a horrible gouge in the wood. While I had to admire these weirdos’ commitment to the bit, my landlord was going to kill me.

But there would be time enough to worry about security deposits later. If I was lucky.

I’d thought I’d been hiding from The Collective successfully.

Apparently, I’d been wrong. Wearing Frederick’s normalcore clothes and only going out when necessary clearly wasn’t enough.

Hades , this was annoying.

I needed to think up something else to throw them off my trail.

The only question was: What?

In the meantime, if they’d found my apartment, I needed to find a new place to stay. And fast.