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  The punch knocked him cold, but the landing woke him up, and he woke up pissed. He popped to his feet and charged me, head down like an angry bull. Well, I’ve watched a couple of matador videos on YouTube, so I did what any good matador does when charged by an angry bull—I stepped out of the way and let my bowling ball-shaped best friend scoop the bull up in a huge bodyslam, sending the bull to the ground once again.

  “Nicely done,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Greg replied, taking a couple of steps back in case Bishop went for his ankles.

  Sure enough, the big Morlock looped an arm out in a sweep that would have taken Greg down just seconds before, but met with nothing but air now. He scrambled to his feet and drew a pistol, aiming it at Greg’s face. “I’m going to kill you, you little son of a bitch.”

  “Drop it,” I said, putting just a hint of power into my voice.

  “You dumbass,” Bishop chuckled. “That shit only works on humans. You can’t compel a vampire.”

  “You can’t. Some can, notably old vamps, powerful vamps, and the Master of the City,” I said. “Which I am. Now put the gun down.” This time I really pushed him, and he knelt down and set the gun on the tunnel floor at his feet.

  Then he stood up and gaped at me. “How the hell did you do that?”

  “I told you, dumbass. I am the Master of the frickin’ City, and you will do what I say, when I say it, or I will kick your ass up around those oversize shoulders. You got that?” He nodded, a hint of fear in his eyes. “Good, now pick up your gun and go tell Rabbit we’re here to see him. And if you get any bright ideas about trying to shoot me, I will shove that pistol so far up your ass you’ll be shitting nine-millimeter bullets for a month.”

  He picked up the gun and ran past us, tossing the occasional worried glance over his shoulder as he went. Greg walked up to me, grinning like an idiot. “Shitting nine-millimeter?” he asked.

  “They can’t all be gold, pal. Now come on, let’s go see a rodent about a girl.”

  Chapter 6

  THE MORLOCK CAMP, for lack of a better word, was different from the last time I’d been there. Admittedly, the last time I’d been there it had been the deserted site of a massacre engineered by Lilith to drive me into a rage-fueled confrontation with then-Master of the City Gordon Tiram. Spoiler alert—it worked. But even taking into account the circumstances of my last visit, there had been some visible improvements. Better lighting, for one thing. Vampires can see in the dark, but it doesn’t mean we love moving around in pitch black. Last time I’d been to the Morlock camp, it was just a sprawling mass of shadows with a few lanterns stuck here and there to beat back the darkness. Now strands of LED Christmas lights hung everywhere, giving the whole area a bright and festive, if blue-tinged, glow.

  There were a lot more people, too. Even more than the earlier times I’d visited there, when Alexis, the leader before Rabbit, was running things. I’d never seen more than fifteen or twenty people down here before, but this time Greg and I passed at least a couple dozen vampires just ambling to and fro like they didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Looks like Rabbit has done a good job securing the place,” Greg said as we walked into the main area of the camp.

  “Yeah, people seem to feel safer, and it certainly looks better,” I agreed.

  “If it weren’t for the stink, you could hardly tell we were walking through a sewer.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You had to remind me.” With his words, the smell that had been buried by my subconscious came rushing back to the forefront. Suddenly I was a lot less enthused about the improvements in the Morlock world. After all, we were still walking in poop.

  The giant vampire who had stopped us in the sewer came running up. “His Majesty will see you at once. Please follow me to his chambers.”

  “His Majesty?” I asked. I looked over at Greg, who shrugged.

  “King Rabbit,” the big vampire said, looking at me like I was stupid.

  I couldn’t actually feel my eyes go dark, but I knew they had by the look on the vampire’s face in front of me. “Oh, please do lead on,” I said, my voice low and very, very steady. I was working very hard not to run ahead and rip Rabbit’s head from his shoulders, really I was. I was lucky only my eyes bled to black instead of Rabbit bleeding to death. Impulse control isn’t my strong suit, but it is something I’m working on.

  I followed the giant, and Greg fell into step right beside me. I looked over at my best friend. “King Rabbit?”

  “I don’t know, dude, but this oughta be good. Where do you think he found a crown small enough to fit his head, a Cracker Jack box?”

  The big vampire whirled on Greg and put his hand around my buddy’s throat, lifting him off the ground. “You will not mock His Majesty in my presence. I am his Sergeant-at-Arms, his right hand of justice and his defender. I was instructed to bring the visitors to his chambers, but nobody said you had to be in one piece when you got there.”

  Greg looked a little surprised, but not terribly worried. I just stood there with my arms folded. The day my pal couldn’t handle one Hulk Hogan-sized vampire without my help was the day we both needed to retire.

  “Bishop,” Greg said, his voice a little choked by the hand on his throat. “You have two seconds to put me down. I won’t even make you apologize.”

  Bishop gave Greg a shake, then pulled him close, bringing their faces together. “I will snap your neck like a twig, you tub of lard.”

  That did it. Greg was teased his entire life about his weight. Hell, I still teased him his entire death, but I was his best friend; I was allowed. This asshole, who looked a lot like all the jerks who tormented me and Greg through middle and high school, was very much not allowed. Greg’s eyes went dark this time, and he gave Bishop a tiny grin before he said, “Your two seconds are up.”

  Then my partner, the overweight comic-book nerd turned private investigator, hacker, and world-saver, opened up a king-sized can of whoopass on Bishop the likes of which the buff Sergeant-at-Arms had probably never seen before. First, Greg headbutted the bigger vampire right in the face, shattering Bishop’s nose against his forehead.

  Then he punched Bishop on the outside of his elbow with his left hand. Since that elbow was part of a fully extended arm, and the hand at the end of that arm was wrapped around Greg’s neck, said elbow bent sharply in a direction elbows were never intended to go. The crack of an elbow snapping was a loud, hollow sound, much different from the wet splooshy sound of a vampire with a crushed nose screaming through sinuses full of blood.

  His right arm useless, Bishop dropped Greg and clutched his elbow, bellowing in pain. Greg saw the big man’s guard was down and slammed a right hook into Bishop’s temple that spun the giant completely around. As he rotated back to the face-to-face position, my pudgy partner jabbed twice with his left, further pulping Bishop’s crushed nose, then dropped him with another uppercut that once again landed right on the point of his jaw. Bishop dropped back, his stream of profanity cut off by the rapid onset of unconsciousness, and he collapsed to his back in the middle of what passed for a main thoroughfare in Morlocktown.

  “That escalated quickly,” I said, looking at Greg, who was rubbing his sore knuckles.

  Greg pulled a handkerchief out of a pocket and wiped a little blood from his face. “Fat jokes are mean. I don’t like mean people.”

  “I can see that. Wanna go talk to Rabbit now?”

  “Might as well.”

  “You think you can behave?”

  “I guess. I mean, come on, that guy was a jerk. He totally deserved it.”

  “Not saying he didn’t. Just want to know if I have to be the reasonable one all of a sudden. I’m not very good at it, so I’ll have to prep.”

  “Nah, I’m good now. Rabbit doesn’t remind me of the villain from an eighties movie.” He gesture
d toward where Bishop lay on the ground, unconscious. He had a point. The big vampire was tall, good-looking, and buff. The way he was dressed was all wrong, but give him a sweater tied around his neck, an IZOD polo shirt, and three Swatch watches and he would be the antagonist in a John Hughes flick.

  We meandered through Morlocktown for another couple of minutes before arriving outside what used to be Alexis’s main meeting hall and office. It, like all the other “buildings” in the Morlock section of the tunnels, was basically just a set of walls thrown together from stolen or discarded building supplies, hauled down into the sewers over years. The buildings had no roofs, and not much in the way of doors, just a bare nod at privacy. The whole area was an abandoned junction of giant sewer pipes, maybe the size of a football field. Alexis’s, now Rabbit’s, “office” was right in the center of the place, a little bigger building than most down here. The room was maybe twenty feet on a side, and when I stepped through the door—really just a piece of stolen plywood with hinges screwed onto one side—I saw that Rabbit had done some redecorating.

  He sat on a huge La-Z-Boy recliner—more throne than chair—at one end of the room and placed on a dais several feet above the floor. Good thing Morlock construction didn’t include ceilings, or Rabbit would have to stoop to get onto his throne, and that kinda kills the regal-ness of it. His La-Z-Boy throne had a LED light strip running along the base of the chair like ground effects, and a huge sunburst of plumbing pipes affixed to the back of the leather, wood, and metal monstrosity.

  Rabbit didn’t stand up as we entered, just waved to us like a demented pageant queen on the world’s most bizarre parade float. “Welcome to Morlock City, Master Black.”

  “Hello Rabbit, or should I call you khaleesi?”

  “Huh?” In his confusion, he dropped the bored mien of the disaffected monarch and just stared like the idiot he really was.

  “What’s wrong, Rabbit?” Greg asked. “Haven’t figured out how to steal HBO down here?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you want, but you can’t just come barging in here. Where’s Bishop?”

  Almost as if he heard his cue, the giant vampire charged through the door, his right arm still flopping uselessly against his side. He looked rough, with blood coating his chest and face, and dirt smeared all over the rest of him from Greg knocking him down. I didn’t want to think too much about the diseases coating that huge pile of vampiric blood and mud. Good thing we were immune to blood-borne pathogens.

  “Your Majesty,” he shouted, “the intruders have—” I didn’t wait to find out what “the intruders” had done. I figured it probably wasn’t anything good, particularly since I was one of those intruders. So I just whirled around and leveled Bishop with a punch to the side of his head. He dropped like a stone, and I turned back to Rabbit.

  “What the hell is all this, Rabbit?”

  “All what, buddy?” the little rodent asked. I swear, he should have called himself Weasel, or Ferret, or just Shit-Rat. He was fast, so Rabbit made sense, but most of the time after I talked to him I felt like I had just conversed with a much less pleasant member of the animal kingdom.

  I walked up to the dais, leaned forward, and snatched him off his throne by the front of his shirt. I flung Rabbit halfway across the room, watching as he slid across the dirt floor to fetch up against Greg’s shins. “First,” I said, crossing the room to loom over him, “we are not buddies. I am the Master of the friggin’ City, and you are one of my least loyal, most pain-in-the-ass subjects. But you are my subject, therefore under my protection. So I haven’t killed you, and won’t. As long as you remain useful and loyal to me. But I will not have you setting the sewers underneath my city up as some kind of little misfit fiefdom, with yourself as King Rabbit the First. You manage the city down here at my pleasure, and the second you displease me, you will be replaced by someone who annoys me less. Are we absolutely damn clear?”

  He looked up at me, and now he resembled his namesake, a frightened little ball of twitch just lying there pooping pellets all over himself. “Y-yes, sir. I understand. I didn’t mean anything by it, I promise.”

  I reached down and helped him up. “You just wanted to feel good about yourself. I get it. It’s important that people feel like they have some control over their environment. It’s why kids hang posters on their walls or dye their hair funky colors.”

  “Yeah, like that,” Rabbit agreed.

  I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “But understand me, Rabbit. If you ever decide to call yourself a King again, I’ll make damn sure that it’s a posthumous coronation.”

  Greg cleared his throat. “Ummm . . . Jimmy?”

  “Yeah, pal?”

  “We’re all dead. It would have to be a post-posthumous coronation.”

  I dropped my head and sighed. “This is why I don’t watch TV with you, buddy. You nitpick worse than anybody I know.” I turned my attention back to Rabbit. “You get the picture, right? You aren’t King of the Morlocks. You aren’t King Rabbit. You lead the Morlocks at their pleasure and mine. The day you want to be in charge, you just give me a call with a time and place. I’ll bring the sword; you bring the rebellion. But make sure your affairs are in order before you make that call, because it’ll be your last damn mistake.” I looked at the diminutive vampire before me.

  He trembled a little as he reached a hand up to me. I helped him to his feet, and he gave me a nod. “I got it, boss. I’ll have the chair taken down tonight.”

  “You do that.”

  Rabbit looked around, his eyes darting to all the various trappings of royalty he had scattered around the room. There was a robe hanging on a coat rack, a scepter on a pair of hooks on the wall, even a crown on a wig head sitting on a spike jammed into a crack in the concrete floor. “I’ll get rid of all this stuff, too.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Greg said, fighting to suppress a grin.

  “Now, ummm . . . what brings you guys to Morlock City? Surely you aren’t here just to discuss my little misunderstanding of my . . . um . . . standing.” Rabbit walked over to a big conference table and sat at the head of it. “Would y’all like something to drink? I’ve got A-positive, B-negative, O-pos, of course, and about half a pint of AB-neg that I’ve been saving for a special occasion.”

  Greg and I walked around the table from opposite directions and settled into chairs at opposite ends, putting Rabbit firmly in the middle of us. His eyes flicked back and forth between us, taking in the fact that we had him flanked. “Let’s talk first,” I said. “We can drink later. We’re here about a girl.”

  “Dude, why didn’t you say so? I got lots of girls!” Rabbit leaned back, his arms spread wide. “I got fat girls, skinny girls, pretty girls, ugly girls, blondes, brunettes, redheads. You name it, I got it. White girls, black girls, Latinas, Asian girls—whatever you need, bro!”

  I slammed my fist onto the table, and Rabbit snapped back to attention. “I’m not looking for a whore, but we’ll talk about you getting into prostitution later. I’m looking for one girl. A human girl. Her name is Julia O’Connell, and she’s missing.”

  Rabbit’s face went pale, as pale as possible for someone who borrows blood to survive and whose heart doesn’t pump. Then he shot out of his chair, jumped up onto the table, and sprinted for the door.

  Chapter 7

  I’M FAST. ALL vampires are fast, but I’m fast even for a dead guy. But Rabbit? Well, he didn’t get his nickname because he gets laid a lot, let’s put it that way. I took off after him, ducking and weaving through the streets of Morlocktown as best I could, but he was steadily pulling away. The little bastard was faster than me. He knew the layout of the shantytown better than I did, and he was a lot less put off by the stink of the sewers than I was. In short, I was losing him.

  So I did the counter-intuitive thing; I stopped chasing him. I stopped short, pulled out my Gl
ock, and steadied my arm against a nearby shack. Shooting a pistol at a target moving away from you is no easy feat and made even tougher when the target moves as fast as Rabbit. Lucky for me I wasn’t panting from the run. Score one for the guy who doesn’t breathe. I squeezed off two shots and saw the bullets ping harmlessly off the tunnel walls. Rabbit froze, then turned to stare back at me.

  “You’re shooting at me?” he yelled. “I thought we were friends!”

  “We’re not friends, Rabbit,” I yelled back. He made a lot better target standing still, so this time when I pulled the trigger, three 9mm rounds slammed into his chest and knocked him to the ground.

  I was on him in seconds, with Greg just a hair behind me. “Nice of you to join us,” I said with a grin.

  “We all have talents in different arenas, Jimmy,” he replied. “Mine lie more in the area of keeping the giant security vampire from breaking you in half.” He jerked his head back the way we came.

  “Bishop?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He was about half a step behind you when I got out of Rabbit’s throne room. I persuaded him that chasing us would be a bad decision.” Greg picked Rabbit up off the ground and tossed him over one shoulder, eliciting a groan from the perforated vampire “king.”

  “Hey! I’m wounded over here,” Rabbit croaked.

  I slapped him upside the head. “Shut up, asshat. Bullets won’t kill you. Those aren’t even silver. A couple pints of blood and you’ll be fine. Unless I don’t like what you’ve got to say about Julia O’Connell, of course. Then you won’t be anywhere close to fine.”

  Rabbit lifted his head to look at me as I walked behind Greg back to the house where we first found the little Morlock leader. “Dude, I ain’t done nothing to Jules. She’s my girl! I love that chick, man.”