Courts and Cabals Read online

  Vampires were the victims of a supernatural disease more than paranormal genetics. Some type of ancient plague permanently changed their DNA makeup back when man was just learning to use tools. It created Homo Sanguinis. Like most supernatural creatures, their myth and legends were spread across cultures, and in the vampire’s case: pop culture. More than any other paranormal entity, the true essence of vampirism had been twisted to meet the needs of hormonal teenage girls.

  Vampires did not have preternatural strength and speed like shifters or succubae, but they were two to three times stronger on average than a normal human. Their particular affliction optimized the human condition. They were not immortal, but their life span was measured in millennia instead of decades or centuries. They possessed heightened senses, and healed incredibly fast as long as they were well fed. They did have a sun allergy, but it was just that; an allergy. Prolonged exposure would give them hives, caused shortness of breath, made them feel ill, and was generally a pain in the ass. They certainly didn’t spontaneously combust under UV lights, and the most common fix for their condition was SPF 100 sunscreen. They were deathly pale, as Makaylah displayed as she approached, but they didn’t favor monochromatic color schemes.

  “That doesn’t make you any less of a dick,” she didn’t accept my explanation as she pulled a loose thread from her bright pink jacket, and brushed her white-blonde hair out of her eyes. Despite the pixie cut, her bangs still tended to get in the way.

  “Olive branch?” I asked, holding out the joint to her.

  She considered it for a moment. “Accepted,” she smirked as she took a hit that consumed half the weed before chasing it with sticky liquid from her water bottle. It sure as shit wasn’t water.

  Makaylah wasn’t a normal vampire in more ways than one. First off, she was a vegetarian. One thing the legends, and chick-lit, got right was that vampires needed blood to survive, but not a lot. A cup would get them through a week, and to over indulge was taboo and could lead to addiction. The blood crazed killing machines people saw in horror movies was the real-life equivalent of a vampire addict on a binger. Due to their prevalence in legend and media, and desire to stay secret since the Church started burning people at the stake during the Inquisition, the bloodsucker head honchos didn’t abide addiction among their population. Up until the Revelation, they took permanent action to stop anyone that went off the deep end.

  Things had changed since they came out to the world. For one, they didn’t kill their own kind as much. There was definitely no sparkle to a vampire’s skin, but as it turned out, they could drink the blood of animals. By the mid-2000s, vampire vegetarianism was all the rage, but with consequences. It required more blood more often, their senses were dulled even when fully fed, and it was rumored their lifespan suffered as a result. Not enough time had passed to test that hypothesis, but it had created an anti-vegetarian movement in the vampire community. Since it was mostly younger vampires turning vegetarian, and their parents adhering to the dietary norm, it was a generational struggle. Since I was part of the food supply, I made sure I knew every St. Vincent’s bloodsuckers’ dietary predilections.

  Makaylah was firmly in the vegetarian camp, but she was also a crusader. Whatever the latest social justice reform was, she jumped in whole heartedly. The t-shirt on beneath her white blouse said meat is murder. She was active on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and had a passionate interest in everything she fought for. Her only problem was her flightiness. She switched causes more than people switched profile pics. Meat might be murder today, but after our conversation, I expected some petition against the patriarchy to pop up on the school’s intranet sometime soon.

  Together, me, Jerome, Brad, and Makaylah were the four musketeers; entertaining each other from the boredom of high school life since 2016. Little did we know things were about to get a lot more interesting.

  Chapter 3

  Like a king, I held court under the bleachers, and each of my friends was a minister of something. Jerome had the drug connection, but none of that hard shit. Even though shifters and other supernaturals tended to have higher tolerances, and less chance of addiction based on their healing abilities, Jerome had a conscience.

  The Whitepaw pack primarily resided on reservations where the reach of local law enforcement was limited, and federal enforcement was underfunded. Those policing the reservation could be easily bought, or were members of the pack and in on it from the start. They operated grow houses and fields where they grew powerful strains of Mary J. Only in the last few years had they started to go legit. Now, they shipped their products to hospitals and private dispensaries all over the country. Unfortunately, that brought them into competition with the southern cartels.

  The pack could handle it. With nearly a thousand shifters, humans, and other supernatural support infrastructure, they had the bodies. They also had the entire United States between the cartels and the pack’s center of operations. So far, there hadn’t been anything they couldn’t overcome.

  All of that was on top of their profitable casino business and tax-free earnings guaranteed by federal treaties close to two hundred years old. They had some of the best lawyers in the country working for them, as well as several politicians and lobbying firms fighting for their interests. Like most packs, the Whitepaw’s engaged in a long-term strategy. They’d set the groundwork for their empire half a century before the Revelation, and they were now reaping the rewards. Jerome was a small part of that as he sat under the bleachers and sold pre-rolled joints. Everything from a gram to an ounce was neatly packaged in little baggies with cartoon illustrations for the particular strain. The entrepreneurial runt made more in a day than a normal kid’s yearly allowance.

  While Jerome handed out Pineapple Express to eager customers stressed about upcoming midterms, Brad and a group of likeminded people were jacked into one of the power outlets around a steel pillar. I considered myself pretty handy with a computer, but Brad had taught me everything I needed to know. The only difference was, I was willing to use my skills for unsavory purposes while him and his group were fighting against the corporate-villain flavor of the week. Today, it was some mega-church whose minister was anti-gay but might be in the closet. Brad and his hacktivists were digging through data to expose the hypocrisy.

  Like with Makaylah, I didn’t really care about their SJW activities. I was more worried about taking care of number one. The vamp in question drew more like-minded warriors to her cause, whatever that might be at the moment. People tended to rotate frequently as she lost interest and found a new target. Today was a frequent target of her frustration: the WRA. The group around her was one of the largest yet, and they were painting signs to stick on two-by-fours for the coming protest they were spontaneously holding in front of the school’s administrative building.

  Since the school administrators had nothing to do with the WRA, other than allowing the UN to set up a recruiting booth at the yearly job fair, I wasn’t sure why they were targeting them. It was probably because they were the “man”, and the easiest target at which the students could vent their frustrations.

  I watched everything going on around me from my spot in the center of the group. The people who came to see me came and went quickly; handing over a roll of crisp bills in exchange for information. With midterms coming up, business was booming.

  “Dupree,” a voice called out, drawing my eyes away from Brad’s giddy reaction to finding a treasure trove of pictures on the cross-dressing minister.

  “Kon'nichiwa, Eiko-san,” I got to my feet and bowed to the boy approaching me.

  He was just slightly taller than me at 6’1”, but ten pounds lighter. His black hair was stylishly spiked and his uniform was made of the highest-grade material. He wore a Rolex, and designer glasses that he didn’t need because he had twenty-ten vision. An entourage of similarly clad and ethnically east Asian boys and girls surrounded him.

  “Do you have it?” the boy looked uncomfortable to be around me and
the Other’s inhabiting the dark space under the bleachers.

  “Of course,” I produced the answer key with a flourish. I might not be supernatural, but a little slight-of-hand could impress little old humans as well as Kami.

  Kami were creatures of legend in their native land of Japan. They were considered spirits, phenomena, or even holy powers that could be anything from a specific landscape, forces of nature, or even spirits of the dead. Unlike a lot of other cultures, they were worships by the still-popular Shinto religion.

  What that produced was a spoiled brat who was used to people literally bowing, scraping, and attending to his every need because they thought he was divine. It didn’t matter that the legends weren’t entirely correct. It didn’t stop the guy in front of me from having a literal god complex.

  In reality, Kami were in the shifter family of supernatural creatures, but with specific differences. They were extremely long lived; more like a vamp’s lifespan than a wolf or bears. Many thought that was because their particular brand of shifting wasn’t to transform into a hulking, hybrid, human-animal beast. They were able to shift to anything with the same amount of mass as them. The unique brand of shifting more than made up for their human-normal strength and speed. It was hard to fight something that could literally turn into fog before you punched it. They could shift their features to whatever struck their fancy, or even look like other people, which was where the whole dead-ancestor legend came from. They could even be trees, rocks, animals, or whatever else they wanted to be. As far as shifting went, Kami were the most versatile.

  By nature, they were a tricky people, secretive, and like everyone else, desperate to retain their grip on power since the Revelation. As it turned out, the Imperial Family of Japan were Kami, and enjoyed being revered as gods. Even more worrisome for humans, it was impossible to tell a shifted Kami from the real thing, which made security professionals next-level paranoid.

  I’d experienced it firsthand. It wasn’t the same as having an imposter President of the United States, but I knew for a fact Eiko had impersonated a teacher on more than one occasion. Usually, to screw with the syllabus or get people out of class.

  He was also one of my sources. We had a quid-pro-quo going on. He scratched my back and I scratched his; which was why he paid nearly nothing for test answers despite having the funds to purchase his own private island. He might only be the nephew of the son of a bastard cousin to the royal family, but that still meant he had royal blood. As such, his father was chief of staff to the Japanese Ambassador to the United States. All that meant was he was right at home at St. Vincent’s.

  I handed over the answer key, and he waved for one of his flunkies to hand me twenty bucks. He reviewed the questions and answers quickly. Kami had eidetic memories, so he handed the sheet of paper back to me after a minute. It didn’t matter if the teacher changed the order of the questions, or had multiple versions of the same test. Eiko was set.

  “I hope you don’t have any contraband stashed in your room,” he suddenly added. “I passed Mr. Miller and Butch on my way here. They looked like they were heading that way.”

  I wasn’t stupid enough to have anything incriminating in my room, but that didn’t mean there was nothing embarrassing. I ground my teeth and purposefully didn’t snap at the Kami. He was supposed to give me a heads up about this type of thing. He’d given me his word and sworn on it, which was much more binding for creatures of magical origin than humans. There were ways around that, case in point; he’d held to the letter of our agreement and told me about Miller, but not the spirit of giving me time to hide anything I needed to.

  “Thank you, Eiko-san,” I bowed as he left, and waited until he was far enough away before sprinting back toward my room.

  St. Vincent’s was a private school, and while some teachers and students lived in the nearby small town, most lived on campus in dorms. It was a lot like college, expect I was pretty sure college didn’t have you check in and out whenever you wanted to leave campus. Thankfully, my dorm was right next to the football stadium. It was a pain on Friday nights when the football team played and I wanted to get some sleep, but it was a stone’s throw from where I did business.

  I swiped my card in the reader at the door and sprinted up the steps. The dorm was four stories with a dozen rooms per floor; two people to a room. Freshman weren’t allowed because they had their own specific dorms, but sophomores to seniors made up the ninety-six students who called Gates Hall home. A teacher acted as a resident advisor on each floor – for more pay I assumed – and lived in an apartment at the end of the hall. I lived on the fourth floor and had Frau Brunner as my live-in monitor. Since I was good at languages, and got straight A’s in her class, she liked me. That sentiment was not shared by the majority of the teachers. In fact, most had an inkling that I was stealing answers and cheating on tests. They couldn’t prove it, and aside from language and history, I was a B minus student at best; not exactly the grades of a career cheater. Still, there were frequent “random” room searches, and it always seemed that my room was selected to participate.

  I ran up to the top floor and stopped to catch my breath. The last thing I wanted to do was give Miller the satisfaction of seeing me rattled. A few deep breaths and I stepped into the hallway. My room was right in the middle of the floor, across from the bathroom, and it was currently open with Miller standing beside it. His arms were crossed and a crotchety expression was etched onto his butt-ugly face.

  “Mr. Dupree,” he practically snarled as he spotted me. “Stand back until we’ve completed our search.”

  There was a bark from inside, and a German shepherd the size of a small bear burst from the room and barreled straight toward me. I braced for impact, and Butch hit me like a cannonball, knocked me off my feet, and proceeded to lick my face like I was a rawhide.

  “Sorry,” Gary, the school’s baby-faced security guard, ran after his charge.

  “It’s ok,” I slipped Butch a treat from my pocket as Gary pulled him off me. It was always a good idea to have the drug sniffing dog like you.

  Miller looked on with disdain, and entered my room. “What do we have here?” the amusement in his voice made me cringe, but I followed. All the stuff Gary found was laying on my unmade bed. Miller picked up a stack of porn and waved it in my face.

  “Those, Mr. Miller, are naked women. I know you haven’t seen one in a while but . . .”

  Miller’s face went beet red, and he looked ready to burst. “Stow it you little shit,” he snapped, and I shut up, but couldn’t stop grinning.

  In truth, the stuff on my bed could probably be found in the room of any other eighteen-year-old boy. There was porn and a vape stick with interchangeable canisters of various flavors. I knew smoking was bad for me, but I’d have time to quit when I was older. Other than that, the only other thing was a small wooden box with a heart carved on it.

  “And what is this?” Miller continued, grabbing the box and wrenching it open.

  The movement drove a spike of rage through my gut. The box was the only thing I had left from my biological mother. It was full of a few trinkets and pictures, which were all I had to remember her by. Miller discarded the valuable personal possessions on my bed like trash, and I felt the rage boil to the point of bursting.

  “Get your hands off that,” I growled. The amount of intimidation, and threat of violence, surprised me as much as Miller. He dropped the box like it was on fire.

  Embarrassment spread across the teacher’s face, quickly followed by anger. He started to get riled up, his chest expanding like a fat pufferfish, as he opened his mouth to yell at me. I cut him off.

  “Don’t touch me!” I yelled, taking a step back. “Don’t touch me in my special bathing suit places!” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face.

  There wasn’t much that scared a tenured teacher like Miller, but sexual misconduct was one of them. There were rules in place to avoid that type of thing, and one of them was to always have two schoo
l officials present when in a student’s room. Currently, Butch and Gary were outside, giving me a perfect opportunity to turn the fucker into the fuckee.

  “No means no, Mr. Miller!” I added theatrically, as Gary came rushing into the room.

  “What’s going on?” the security guard looked around with a confused look on his too-young face.

  I raised an eyebrow at Miller, allowing him to take the lead. “Nothing,” the old man grumbled, as he glared at me with a new level of hatred. “Remember you have detention this Friday, Mr. Dupree. We’re going to have a lot of fun.” The threat was clear, but it was Wednesday, so I still had forty-eight hours until that particular torture session.

  Miller stormed out, and Gary followed with Butch, not sure what just happened. I approached the bed and carefully started putting stuff back in the box. One trinket was an antique pocket watch. I’d gotten it appraised awhile back, and it wasn’t worth much. It had more sentimental value, and besides, it didn’t work. I flipped it open to see an engraving that was probably more at home in ancient cave paintings than a fifty-year-old watch. I tried to have it deciphered, but it was most likely an old proto-language. Not spoken or known anymore by the community-college level professors I’d taken it too, and I wasn’t willing to track down a specialist and pay an arm and a leg for something that might just be chicken scratch.

  Next was a rosary made of pearls. I remembered mom being religious. She was French-Canadian, thus the last name Dupree, and had taken me to mass every Sunday. I barely remembered the sermons, and now, I even have a hard time picturing her face. It had been a decade since she died, and the river of time was slowly eroding my memories.