Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

But then the weirdest thing happened.

The little one, Duncan, said something in German. To Cvetko. Like he had heard Cvetko’s accent and decided it was close enough to German that he would try it out. He popped an eye over to Margaret to see if she understood.

She didn’t.

But Cvetko did. Cvetko’s dead fluent in German, just like Russian, French, English, Spanish, Latin, even Hungarian. Who the fuck speaks Hungarian? Cvetko, that’s who. But German.

When they had gone back and forth for a good while, Cvetko sent them off to play on the tracks, they liked the tracks, and took Margaret and me aside to tell us what they said.

“This boy, Duncan, speaks German because his mother is from East Berlin. These are all the children of British diplomats or translators. They went missing some time ago, perhaps last year, perhaps several years ago; Duncan doesn’t understand time very well and the others will not discuss these matters. They were all charmed away en masse from where they played in Stuyvesant Park, herded into our very old friend’s van, and turned in his basement. They lived with him in captivity until the winter, I assume this winter, when Peter decided he wasn’t going to take it anymore.”

“Take what anymore?” Margaret had said.

“Must I say it?”

“Don’t be squeamish. If something’s to be done, it won’t be done on hints and rumors.”

He said it.

I’ll spare you the details, but games were played. You know, those games that aren’t really games, but the grown-up puts child-friendly names on them. Margaret’s fangs were showing completely by the time Cvets finished that part, and it looked like it took some effort for her to drape her lip back over them and put them away.

“I’ll have to speak to him first. I’ll see it in his eyes if it’s true. I just can’t seem to make myself believe it,” she said, drooling and wiping it off with the sleeve of her bathrobe. People drool when they’re charmed. Vampires drool when they want to bite.

“We often live next to monsters unawares,” Cvetko said. “Look at us, carrying on our business below the feet of stockbrokers and secretaries; their shadows pass over our grates by day and we crawl into their windows by night.”

“You and your fucking philosophy,” Margaret said.

“The Son of Sam,” I chimed in. I had followed that with interest.

She waved my comment away.

“How did they bust out?”

“As Odysseus escaped the cave of the Cyclops,” Cvetko said.

“I must have missed my lesson that day. And how was that?”

“Sammy blinded him with a pencil.”

Peter liked the Rolling Stones. He must have seen Mick Jagger on TV because he actually did a little imitation of him, dancing and shaking his ass, hands on his hips, pouting out lips still bloody from the hunt. Watching him wiggle around like that was a little ooky after learning what had happened to him, but I put that out of my mind. He was just a kid. This was our third time playing “Gimme Shelter” on my hi-fi set and he was lip-syncing almost the whole thing. I boogied with him, tried to get Cvetko to join in but that was like trying to make a turtle play basketball. Manu danced with us, though. This was taking place in the common area outside our rooms, mine and Cvetko’s, I mean. We had abandoned their lockers and stolen new ones, easier than humping theirs all the way here, and Peter’s had been just a little small for him anyway. This time we got individual lockers, put them in their individual cells. These cells were honeycombed back here.

The transit police had come by the 18th Street station, like a dozen of them with lights and guns. We heard them a mile off, got clear fast, hiding our most important shit behind a false panel of loose tiles we hoped they still didn’t know about, came back for it later. This was nothing unusual, they did it from time to time, but it meant we should leave it alone for a while. That station was too close to the surface to be good long-term digs.

Probably some observant conductor caught sight of one of us, saw the lockers, who knows. Whatever the reason for the lame little raid, I asked Margaret if we could move back into our regular place and move the kids in with us. I could tell she wasn’t thinking about peeling them anymore. She was on their side now.

It had been a tense night. Hunting had gone okay, even though we had to feed Peter four times. The kids were happy, but the rest of us were on edge. We knew the Latins were going to peel the Hessian tonight; they had been casing his place and had a plan. I, for one, didn’t have a lot of faith in that plan. But I have to admit, I was curious to know what he was sitting on. Gold doubloons?

“What do you think the Hessian’s sitting on?” I asked Cvets. “Underground, I mean. What do you think he has?”

“Besides a room that locks from the outside for the imprisonment of children?”

“Don’t be a grump. You know what I mean. Treasure-wise.”

“Perhaps the lost gold of the Knights Templar.”

Always some obscure shit with him.

“No, really,” I said.

“Why didn’t you go on the expedition with our Hispanic friends? You might have seen for yourself.”

“I don’t think it’s going to go well for them,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“What should be done, then? About this kid business?”

He looked at me.

“Must something always be done?”

“Everybody knows you don’t turn kids. Let alone all that other stuff. Are you saying we ought to let that slide?”

“I am playing devil’s advocate. Indulge me.”

“It’s not right.”

“Neither was the suppression of Hungary by the Soviets. Or the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese.”

“Yeah, I remember people saying something about Tibet. The Dalai Lama, right?”

“Yet both acts went unpunished. Why?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m talking about our neighborhood.”

“It is only a question of scale. Why did not the brave American army march into Budapest and save the Hungarian resistance who begged Mr. Eisenhower, in the name of democracy and freedom, to take their side? Why did we sit by while the Soviet tanks rolled in and hammered the beautiful old city?”

“That happened?”

“You have just written the epitaph of America. Yes, that happened. Twenty-two years ago. It was on the radio. It was in the newspapers. What were you doing, watching the Looney Tunes? Sitting in Battery Park with Emma Wilson?”

“Shut up.”

He knew better than to talk about Emma Wilson.

But I saw what he was getting at. He spelled it out anyway.

“The application of justice is a by-product of power. We look to leaders to protect us. We organize for collective defense. Or collective acquisition. Why do we submit to Margaret’s governance?”

“She’s tough and she knows her shit.”

“Precisely. But is she tough enough to impose her ethics, such as they are, on other groups not under her direct supervision? Should vampires in Brooklyn refrain from feeding under Borough Hall or Court Street because she has decided it is verboten for us?”

“The feeding thing is about protecting your turf. Let them do what they want.”

“Might not the discovery of murders underground in Brooklyn lead to sweeps of the tunnels in all of the boroughs? The transit police are not parochial.”

“Sure. But we can’t make Brooklyn guys do what we say.”

“Can we not? I doubt there is a larger enclave than ours in Brooklyn. We could give them an ultimatum.”

“Yeah, but that’s a big fight if they say no. What’s it win us?”

“Now you are thinking like President Eisenhower. And like Margaret.”