The Theocracy - The Blackened Cross - 9. Chapter 9

Vanus emerged from the bathroom in a thick fog of steam, dressed in fresh clothes, his hair brushed back from his brow. He scowled in disappointment. The Astorathian hadn’t left. The death magician had sat against the door of the shower stall until the heat seeped out of the water in hopes that Bazzelthorpe would pick up the hint and leave. With the way his luck had been going lately, Vanus told himself he better get used to things not going the way he wanted.

The Astorathian’s face was…relaxed? Perplexed?...as he scanned the spines of the volumes that filled Van’s bookshelf. It was hard to guess what he was feeling. It was the first glimpse Van had caught of the giant’s face when his scarred face wasn’t rumpled with disdain.

Vanus went to the fridge, suddenly ravenous. He hadn’t eaten anything all day (he grieved briefly for the General Tso’s chicken he now had no desire to try in the definite future) and now his stomach felt like an endless, hollow pit. He reached into the fridge, tossing things lazily on the counter: sliced turkey and provolone, mayonnaise, and honey-wheat bread. Carbs, the perfect preventative for a hangover. He set about making himself a sandwich with brooding determination, doing his best to ignore Bazzelthorpe.

Bazzelthorpe eventually turned away from the bookshelf. He approached the counter slowly, as if afraid of startling Vanus. Vanus was too busy scarfing down his sandwich to care. Mayonnaise dripped down his chin, leaving a white trail behind it.

Bazzelthorpe cleared his throat. Vanus tensed, preparing himself for another disparaging comment about what a disappointment he was. "Your home is nicer than I expected."

The death magician wiped at his face with a towel. "Were you expecting something a bit more gothic?" he asked. "Ritualistic daggers, maybe a dead body or two? You wouldn't be the first. I've heard it all: how morgues are my favorite places to party, how I like to go gravedigging and shag the dead like a necrophiliac. At the end of the day I'm too tired for all that."

"I didn't know they said those things about you," Bazzelthorpe said.

“Head too far shoved up your own buttocks?” Van muttered under his breath.

“What?” The Astorathian watched him intently, his expression hooded.

“Nothing,” Vanus said lightly with a wicked grin to prove his benevolence. “Just thinking out loud. I’m going to make myself a sandwich. Would you like one?”

Bazzelthorpe looked down at the food on the counter as if it would all jump to attack him. “No thank you. I only eat the food of my people."

"So…" Vanus made a show of smacking his lips. "Gwen threatened to fire you, did she?"

Bazzelthorpe made a deep harrumphing sound in his chest. His scarlet skin paled white. Vanus had never seen an Astarothian blush before. "Yes."

Vanus couldn't stop himself from chuckling at that. "Don't let her act fool you. She might talk like she's reading straight from an inspirational self-help book, but when it comes to getting her way she can be manipulative. Cunning. Relentless."

"She is a vamp," Bazzelthorpe muttered.

Vanus shook his head in disbelief. "See, there you go again."

Bazzelthorpe blinked in confusion. "Where am I going?"

The death magician didn't pause to explain. "You have a problem of judging people based on some flawed misconception."

The scars around Bazzelthorpe's mouth darkened, his lips puckering. "Misconception?"

"Damn straight. How in the hell did you get recruited into the Theocracy."

"I am big, fast, and strong."

"And a bastard." Vanus was angry all over again. He couldn't keep his hands from clenching into fists. "You had no right to say what you did to me about…about Hellen…?" He felt his voice plunge down to a whisper when he said her name. "You don't even know me."

To his surprise Bazzelthorpe hung his head. He actually looked guilty. "I know."

"And you don't know what that case was like. It wasn't just a serial killer case, it was a circus show. By the time I got on the scene five Astar…victims had been found and there was little to go on because the Roc City Department kept brushing it off."

It was happening again. The long nights. The endless search through graffitied parks and trash-filled alleyways. The hiss of accusing whispers at his back as he raced from crime scene to scene. The stench of the Slums that clung to his skin and hair like a sticky film.

Carlos tried to do what he could to help. Mother knew he'd tried. But his words, his touch, nothing he did reached him. Vanus had been trapped in a dark cave, his own private Void. When he found Hellen's body he let the darkness of the Void engulf him completely. He'd experienced periods of such darkness as a child, but he'd always emerged in the end.

You never left the void, a snide voice from the echoes of the past teased. You're still stuck there.

"Vanus."

A powerful voice cut through the fog. Judging from the impatience he heard in Bazzelthorpe's tone, this was not the first or even second time he'd called his name.

"Sorry. Lost my train of thought."

White chalk puffed up along the ridges and scars of Bazzelthorpe's cheeks. He was blushing again. "I am not very good with people…or apologizing. I've been on my own for far too long. I have no friends. No family. Up until you, the boss woman…"

Vanus snickered in spite of himself. He clapped a hand over his mouth.

The Astorathian glared at him.

"Sorry." The death magician held up his hands in surrender. "I just think it's amusing how you call her boss woman."

Bazzelthorpe blinked. "Should I not call her that?"

"Perhaps not to her face. In private you can call her whatever you like. Please continue."

"My job with the Theocracy is the only thing that has given me any purpose since I came to this city," the Astorathian said. "If I lose it, I don't know what I will do."

"I understand," Vanus said and found he meant it. He sighed. "It has always been the same for me. The Theocracy isn't perfect. No government system is. But we also help a lot of people. We keep the darkness at bay. Tell Gwen I will be in the first thing tomorrow."

Bazzelthorpe's tail uncoiled, hanging down to the floor. His eyes widened. "You will? I am forever in your debt."

Now it was Van's turn to glare. "You better not make me regret this, Astarothian."

Tail bouncing, shoulders shaking with irrepressible excitement, Bazzelthorpe shook his head. "I won't."

On many long sleepless nights, Van would wonder if that was the moment they became friends.

…

Bazzelthorpe hadn’t been telling the truth when he said he didn’t eat human food. He loved human food. If anything the food…and the beer, the booze (there were so many names for it) were one of the things that made coming to this new place worth anything.

Tonight he would be treating himself to his favorite: a feast of three rotisserie chickens and two twelve packs of beer. It wouldn't make the night alright but it would make it bearable.

Normally the first thing he did was strip out of the day's clothes, sit down in front of the TV, and turn it onto Jerry Springer and The Maury Show where humans proved themselves to be every bit as stupid as Bazzelthorpe expected them to be. Instead he found himself getting onto the laptop he’d bought used from the pawn shop on the corner just down the street. He didn’t use the device often - the keys were too small for his fat fingers. If he envied the humans one thing it was the way they could type so quickly while he had to stab at the keys carefully one at a time. Still, he supposed it had its uses. It was portable and could look up information quickly.

He got on Google and typed Vanus Kaufman in the search query. Each letter typed was an exercise in patience.

A number of links immediately blinked across the screen. It didn’t take Bazzelthorpe to find one he was interested in. The death magician’s face popped up, frozen in time, lit by cameralight; his hair brushed back, his suit pressed, his face full of warmth and reassurance. The version Bazzelthorpe had visited today looked nothing like the version of Vanus on the screen.

It took Bazzelthorpe three attempts to hit the play button; the first two times he overshot the mark. While the video buffered he reached for one of the chickens. With a tug of hunger he brought a chicken leg to his mouth and tore into it. Juice oozed down his bare chest as the steaming meat slid down his throat, mostly intact. On the screen, Vanus said, “I want to assure not only the citizens of Roc City, but the Astorathian who have come to our city seeking safer shores, that the Theocracy, myself especially, are doing everything we can to bring the Astoriathian Butcher to justice…”

Bazzelthorpe hit the pause button without thinking. He got up and grabbed Giel’s ashes from the mantel atop the fireplace. The armchair squealed in agony beneath the press of his weight. His tail coiled into a tight ball. He popped a can of beer open and slugged the whole thing down in a single go. He hit the play button.

When the newsreel was over he restarted it from the beginning.

The next thing he knew, he was picking his aching head off the back of his chair. A groan escaped his throat, a throat that felt like raw hamburger (which he also loved). He pulled himself up out of the chair. Something crunched audibly beneath his feet. It was the laptop; flickering light seeped up through the cracks in the monitor.

“Vulagin!” he shouted. This was the Astorathian equivalent for fuck.

There was nothing he could do about it. It was eight o’clock. He had just enough time to hop in the shower and get to headquarters via the train. The death magician said he would be there. If not, the boss woman will fire me!

From the ride on the train to headquarters his teeth were on edge and his tail was tucked in. It remained hidden in the shadow of his rump all the way into the boss lady’s office. It wasn’t until he saw the death magician’s shadow through the glass partition of the door with the words CAPTAIN RENARD stamped in bold black letters that his heart slowed back down to a normal crawl.

The death magician and vampire were already in the middle of a conversation when Bazzelthorpe slid into the room. The boss lady tilted a half smile in his direction, a tic so fast only an Astorathian could catch it, but Vanus did not acknowledge his presence immediately. He appeared to be absorbed in whatever the boss woman had to say. While the plains of his forehead remained relaxed, the brackets around his mouth formed mountains of tension that remained in place; those had not been in the videos he'd watched last night. Not yet.

When he did notice, the death magician looked mildly surprised. The lips curved into the quick spasm of a good morning smile. Those brackets of tension never eased.

Then the boss woman said in a particularly sharp tone, "Good, now that things are in order we have a bit of morning cleanup work to do. Bazzelthorpe, there's a desk in storage with your name on it. Your first task for the morning is to park it in the corner of Van's office and merge caseloads with one another."

Vanus who had yet to curse beyond mild expletives as far as Bazzelthorpe was aware of, said the human equivalent for the word, "Fuck."