14Please respect copyright.PENANA5ewusSETv1
“I heard you got a rough time today?”
Uncle took his hand off the steering wheel and clapped me on the knee. We were driving home.
“Yeah, it was lots of fun,” I made a sour grin.
“Just remember, Rettle is a great teacher. Some of his “exercises” can scare you half to death, but he would never really do you any harm. Not counting bruises and cuts, of course. There’ll be a lot of that! But nothing more. And his method really works. If you stick with it and go on to become a paladin, his schooling might literally be a lifesaver.”
“Well, at least I won't get bored.”
“That’s right, Sammy, that’s right.”
Uncle gave me a friendly smile and chuckled. He must have remembered something amusing from his training under Rettle.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about Stoker,” I said.
“Go on.”
“Why the hell do you keep such as asshole in the Order?”
Uncle smirked again.
“Come on, he’s not that much of an asshole.”
“Yes, he is! He’s awful! Slimy, sleazy, nasty, he keeps poking fun at people, making lousy jokes about them. A first-rate asshole!”
“And he also caught you off guard twice.”
“It’s not that!” I protested although I knew very well that it was just the source of most of my indignation. “Rettle even shot at me, but I'm not holding a grudge against him!”
“Why not? Why aren’t you holding it against Rettle but it pisses you off to see Stoker in the Order?” asked Mike.
“Because! Rettle is doing all that to teach me, to prepare me! He’s not trying to assert himself at my expense, he only wants to keep my head from being ripped off in the real fight. But Stoker, he enjoys all this! He likes catching people off guard and scoffing at them! He gets his rocks off doing it!”
“I don’t think he gets his rocks off doing it so much, but, sure, Stoker’s personality is something. Still, he’s a fine professional, excellent even. We would have had a much more difficult time without him. This is another one of the wonderful things about adult life – you have to work with people you can’t stand. I mean you here. I don’t have a problem with Stoker. He takes getting used to, but he’s okay. Also, he’s Rettle’s right-hand man, his main assistant in everything.”
“But he’s an asshole! A real asshole!”
“Oh, Sam. People aren’t as simple as you think. You may not believe it, but deep inside Stoker may be the most sensitive and vulnerable of all the Order members.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Then let me tell you how I met him.”
I gestured for uncle to start his tale.
“As I’ve told you before, paladins’ punishment raids aren’t the only and not even the most important purpose of our Order. Since times immemorial Night Guardians have tried to convert other vampires to the “daytime faith.” Our great founder, the First Guardian, understood that punishment was of secondary importance. Penal measures against nighttime vampires were necessary, but even a deserved execution was still murder. And murder is evil. A necessary evil, but still evil. And evil is not a sound building material for anything. Any totalitarian regime eventually falls apart because executions, prisons, denunciations, total surveillance and their other building blocks are all evil. And evil doesn’t build, it destroys. That’s why for our Order, in contrast to our government, prevention always had priority over punishment. We seek to find vampires who haven’t really hurt anyone yet and teach them the right way. That's what I devote most of my time to.”
“You were going to tell me how you met Stoker,” I interrupted my uncle.
“That’s right. It was seven years ago. One day I stumbled across a strange story, the urban legend kind. In a nearby town, girls, coming home from a bar on their own, would suddenly pass out. That didn't sound like much of a story by itself. So they had a little too much to drink – happens to anyone. But all of these girls found a needle mark on their necks afterward. The urban legend was that there was a weirdo in town who followed tipsy gals, put them to sleep with a drug injection and then did his perversions to them. Only the victims weren’t raped, and they kept their things, too. So police stayed out of it.”
Uncle looked at me to see if I followed the story. I did.
“We’d had a very incident-free month, and I decided to look into this case out of boredom. I drove to that town, asked around and found a few girls to whom that happened. Most of them remembered nothing about what happened after they’d left the bar and until the unpleasant awakening on the sidewalk with a needle mark on their necks. But the one who’d drunk the least managed to recall that someone had been following her, and when he’d caught up with her, he’d grabbed her face and covered her mouth and nose with his hand. I instantly thought of chloroform.”
I looked at Uncle questioningly.
“You know, like in the movies. You pour the liquid on a rag, cover someone's face with it, and the victim passes out. They used to use chloroform as a general anesthetic in hospitals. You inhale the vapors and off you go to the dreamland.”
I nodded. Mike continued.
“But why would the attacker chloroform someone and then dope her with a tranquilizer to boot?”
“Someone was stealing their blood!” I exclaimed. “Lee told me that the last guy, the nighttimer you whacked, he was taking people’s blood with a syringe as well.”
“Many nighttime vampires start out this way. A clotted puncture from a needle can be as much a sign of a vampire's attack as bite marks on the neck these days. By the way, modern vampires don’t often bite their victims. It’s not easy to bite through a vein, much less an artery, without getting blood all over yourself and spilling a lot. In my experience, the ones to bite victims were either young vampires, driven crazy by bloodlust, or inveterate beasts who got a sort of aesthetic pleasure from it.”
“You went off on a tangent again instead of telling the Stoker story,” I interrupted my uncle again.
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. Cut to the chase, I suspected that our uncatchable sex predator was really a blood-stealing vampire. I started to search. It was hard going at first. There were fewer surveillance cameras on the streets in those days. Police databases were less complete and, in all honesty, I wasn’t such a good snoop yet. I was about to give up. After all, there was no proof of a vampire, no real victims. An unpleasant awakening on the street could even do good to some party girls. And just then as if to spite me, there was the first real victim. They found a girl’s body in the back-street.”
“That maniac killed her?” I was eager for Uncle's story to culminate.
“Yes and no. There were no signs of violence, except the needle mark. An autopsy showed the girl had heart problems. She’d had too much to drink, putting stress on her heart, and the blood the criminal took was the last straw. The heart couldn’t take it and just stopped.”
“But it was still his fault!” I exclaimed.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Did you find him?”
Uncle just nodded.
“It was Stoker? He was the one who killed the girl!?”
Uncle nodded again, let out a rather somber sigh and continued.
“I found traces of someone called Edgar Alvarez, once bartender, then unemployed. He had a few priors for small stuff, but on the whole, Edgar seemed like an ordinary guy.”
I thought to myself that Stoker didn’t look much like a Latino with his pale skin, though he did have raven-black hair.
“I learned his address,” uncle continued. “Alvarez rented a tiny room in an apartment building. I took a gun and paid him a visit, not quite sure what I would do once I catch Señor Alvarez. I broke the door to his apartment and found Edgar in a noose under the ceiling...”
“And what happened?” I asked.
“I cut the rope. We talked. It turned out Stoker learned about what had happened from the local news. He recognized his victim, and it was a profound shock for him. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Stoker very rarely came out to “hunt” and only took the absolute minimum of blood, just enough to suppress his inner beast. I'd never seen a vampire as thin and gaunt as Stoker was that first time. The guy had nearly starved himself to death just to avoid hurting someone. Yes, he can come across as a terrible asshole, but all his jokes and tricks are more of a defense Stoker puts up to not let strangers see how vulnerable he really is. He’s a good colleague. And he’s saved my life a couple of times. So, please, be more tolerant of him. And you'll learn what he's really like when you get to know him better. Haven't you noticed that nobody in the Order minds when he's being a jackass? Because they all know that Stoker is a good guy, only with issues. But after all, most of us have some.”
“What are your issues?” I asked.
Uncle gave me a conspiratorial look and whispered, “I watch lots of porn. Lots and lots and lots of porn!”
I punched him on the shoulder and laughed. Mike’s face lit up with his usual kind smile, and he joined his laughter to mine.
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