The Finder sits in the back of his van with his feet up. The sun beating on the outside heated it like an oven. He doesn’t care he touches the wounds on his chest from the holy slushy; he curses under his breath. They are healing slowly and smell like cherry. He tries to ignore it.
“I bet he has no idea who the holy order of the truck stop is.” He scrolls through his notes on his laptop. He stops at his notes about the door.
“The door of Hephaestus status: Missing” The heading read.
“You are not missing anymore, just hiding.” The finder climbs into the front seat of the van. The thick sunblock and the heavy sunglasses are enough to protect him from the sun. The heavily tinted windows block out even more. You don’t live this long as a vampire without abundant caution.
He uses his computerized binoculars to look into the gas station. The digitally enhanced image is set to the lowest brightness. He taps on the dash as he waits for something to change, and to his delight, after only 45 dreadful minutes of waiting, Josh Gas comes out of the store and gets on a motorcycle and drives away.
The vampire drives up to the abandoned gas station and looks into the window. The store looks untouched. The lights are off, and the sign on the door is flipped to “Sorry, we are closed.” He tugs on the door, and it doesn’t move.
He works his way around the building looking for a simple way in. “You would think after almost 1100 years of life I would have learned to pick a lock.” He circles back to the front. “But why bother when I can just,” he punches the glass, and it shatters to the floor, “make my own door?” He reaches in and unlocks the door, then he casually walks into the gas station.
The lights are off, but he doesn’t care; the sun is blasting through the windows. Providing more than enough light for him to navigate his way to the spot where he saw the door before. He sniffs the wall; he touches it. “It was definitely here; the amulet says so.” He feels his pocket, and the stone is warm. “It was here recently.”
“Why did you come here, door?” He asks as he looks around the empty gas station. His ears are on high alert for any sign of incoming trouble. He searches through the snack aisles and through the section with books and magazines. He sees one about Berlin. He fights with the urge to flash back to that place. But he fails, and his mind is thrown back in time.
BERLIN
It was Berlin before the wall came down. There was a Cat running a bar. The bar is an artifact from a time when man was still trying to figure out how to plant crops. It was looted from another city, then another city, then another city. The cat is a thing trapped and caged. A thing with ears that hear too much. I walked into the Cat’s bar with the blood dripping from my clothes. I hated the smell. I hated the German language; I hated Berlin. And I hated him. He stood behind the bar with a smile until his eyes locked with mine, then a deep, inhuman frown formed on his smug face.
The game was still fun before Berlin. Find a hint of something ancient and precious or powerful or just singular and track it down. You have infinite patience when you’re going to live forever.
Berlin changed everything. As soon as I asked questions, I hit a roadblock. No one would talk to me. I tried everything. I used my gaze, I used my fists, and I bribed. No one wanted to talk with me. But they heard what I was saying as I slept in my hotel room that day. Humans broke in and threw a glitter bomb inside.
Not some harmless gender reveal glitter bomb. German anti-supernatural being ordinance.
I woke to the noise and confusion of the grenade. The microfine particles of silver covered my body, my eyes, and my tongue, and as I breathed in to yell, I drew them into my lungs.
Then they came at me; the silver slowed me down and weakened me. I fought hard, but they caught me. and dragged me to an abandoned church, incredibly old, and held me there on consecrated ground. I could feel the strength slowly draining out of me.
A man wearing a quality suit and tie walked up to me and scoffed. “We looked for your kind during the war, and we found NOTHING,” he yelled in my face. “And now your kind thinks it can just waltz into this town and ask questions.”
He kicked a lectern, sending a Bible spilling across the floor.
“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you right here.” He twirled around, gesturing to the empty but very much consecrated grounds. “If you die here, you die forever,” he laughed. “Give me one reason to let you live.”
“If you don’t, you will be hunted to the ends of the earth.” I grinned, the heavy iron-silver alloy chains feeling like they weighed several tons. The weight is crushing, trying to rip my soul out of my body and send it down into the earth. If that wasn’t enough, every moment was filled with pain. The particles of silver burn scars in my lungs only to have them heal and then burn again.
“Good point. But you were asking about another point, the spear. You can’t have it, and I can’t trust you to let it go,” the man said as he paced back and forth.
“See, before I only wanted it for the reward, and now I want it because you don’t want me to have it.” I grinned, showing my sharp teeth. I grunted, and my skin rippled; the chains grew tighter, and then the links stretched.
“What are you doing? You can’t do this! You’re on consecrated ground,” the man shouted as the chains grew thinner until they finally snapped.
I stood up, blood dripping from my eyes. “I guess you don’t know as much about vampires as you think.” I reached out and grabbed the man and held him by the throat.
“Where is it?” I screamed at the man. Shaking him softly. His bodyguards rushed forward, guns pointed at me, but lead is nothing to fear when you’re a vampire, just a temporary piercing.
“I won’t ask again.” I shouted, but he refused to talk.
That’s the last thing I remembered until my rage cleared. Most of the wounds healed, but the silver confetti was inside me now.
I became aware of my surroundings again with the light from the morning sun rising up from the horizon. I went back to my hotel room; the cops swarmed the building. “Well, shit, there goes my kit,” I said, but I had bigger problems: the sun.
I looked around the street and ducked into an alley, the darkness buying me more time. I checked the basement windows until I found one open. I slid inside and made my way to a bathroom and cleaned as much of the silver dust from my body as possible.
Gas station
A noise from the street pulled him back to the present. He looks out the door, and a green army jeep just keeps going past. “That silver was the beginning of my hell.” He rubs at the sores under his shirt. “No matter what I try, I can’t get it out.” He goes back to scowling as he checks every room in the building.
He stops in the sex store. “Holy crap,” he looks through the reel-to-reel canisters and points at one, “His Dark Vampiric Desires.” He grins. “No shit, he has the classics. It wasn’t my best work, but it was fun.”
The vampire knocks a row of dildos off the shelf in anger. “What is so special that after 2800 years the door decided to be friends with this human?” He sits in Josh’s chair behind the counter.
His mind slips back to Berlin.
BERLIN
I worked my way through the city, going from crime boss to hidden Nazi to hidden crime boss Nazi. The silver particles make an already dangerous work more dangerous.
That brought me to the bar with the cat dripping with blood. Our monstrous history kept the cat from telling me what he knows. But I had a thought on my way out. ‘That suit looks like government… And the ordinance was ex-military goons, high-end bodyguards. He was well connected’
I burned my way through Berlin until I found the trident.
It was in a chest at the back of the mayor’s house. He denied it, the fool. I ended him and took the trident.
Gas Station
He snaps back to the present. ”I can’t get lost in the past now I am so close to being free.”
He itched his skin and walked back to the van.
