I smiled, pleased to see some of his old personality coming through. My last memory of Fang had been troubling at best. He was robotic, lifeless, and, if you asked me, lost.
Now that I had him, I wasn’t sure what to say to him. It had been many months since we had last spoken, and many more before that when our relationship was irrevocably changed. After some false starts, I finally wrote: Still a vampire?
Or something.
I nodded to myself. Yes, being a vampire wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. A host was more accurate.
Where you living now?
In L.A.’s Echo Park district.
Still bartending?
I almost, almost sensed him laughing, but probably not. He would have laughed at that, but not anymore.
No, Moon Dance.
Okay, I’ll bite. No pun intended. What are you doing for work these days?
I don’t need to work, Sam.
I nodded to myself, suddenly getting it. Hanner left you money. Probably a lot of money.
Something like that.
Of course, Hanner wouldn’t have had a traditional will, not when she was over a century old. Besides, whoever heard of a vampire having a will? More than likely, Hanner had simply given Fang access to her accumulated wealth. Probably the case with other vampires, with money being passed to each new generation of bloodsuckers. I was probably the only idiot vampire who actually worked. For all I knew, Fang was sitting on top of a pile of gold, stolen and stockpiled by the ageless and undead. No doubt stolen and looted from countless victims. Or, even better, just given to them by compelled victims.
I could do something similar, I knew. I could, with some training, stand outside the local Bank of America, and compel all those who came and went to empty their savings accounts for me. In fact, it would probably be easy to do.
Indeed, the entity within me perked up at this line of thinking. Yes, she and her kind were used to living this way, of manipulating and exploiting and destroying.
I pushed her out of my mind, or as far out as I could.
So, you do nothing, then? I asked him. Just sitting around and drinking goblets of blood?
Oh, there is much I do, Sam. Some things I can talk about, some I can’t.
You are setting up another blood bank, I wrote. No, I might not be able to read his mind anymore, but I was also a trained investigator who happened to be pretty good at her job.
Yes, Sam, but it’s not what you think.
And what am I thinking?
That we are killing people, draining them dry, like Robert Mason did in Fullerton.
And Hanner, I said. Let’s not forget her role.
Indeed, her role had been to help the murders slip through the cracks, to help the police forget, to hide and manipulate the facts.
Fang was writing something, and then paused. I knew this because the words “Fang950 is typing” had been flashing in the upper corner and then it quit flashing. I really didn’t know what he was going to write, but a part of me thought he might have been about to defend Hanner.
He loved her, I suddenly thought. He loved her and he’d killed her...
Killed her for me.
I knew that Hanner and Fang had been close. I knew that she had taught him the ins and outs of vampirism, something that had never been taught to me. Hell, it still seemed I was learning something new every day.
Yeah, it stood to reason that the very creature who had turned him, trained him, and fed him in his early days would be the object of his affection.