The Trouble with Bats, page 1
part #5 of The Ironspell Chronicles Series
Table of Contents
Llaughing Llama Media LLC
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
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About the Author
THE TROUBLE WITH BATS
MH BONHAM
Llaughing Llama Media LLC
© 2019 by M. H. Bonham.
Published by Llaughing Llama Media, LLC.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.
Cover by M.H. Bonham.
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chapter One
“You’re going where and doing what to vampires?” I stared at Droid in utter shock.
My buddy, Droid, hacker extraordinaire and self-taught technomage leaned back in his chair in the University of Colorado’s commons area and smirked. His real name was Joshua, but nobody called him that. He was a skinny guy who had just turned twenty with long, dirty blond hair and a beard that I was envious of. It made him look old enough to convince any bartender that his fake ID was real. “I said I’m going to Highland’s Ranch and dumping a load of mice and bats there so the fang bangers can deal with them in their yuppie homes. Wanna go with me?”
I looked askance at my friend. Droid wore his typical torn jeans and Metallica T-shirt, even though the temperatures precluded wearing summer clothes. “It’s Halloween. If we’re lucky, we might score some dates at the campus party.”
“So you can show your girlfriend your ‘tiny house?’” Droid snickered.
I could feel the heat coming off my face as it reddened. “Hey, it is a tiny house, and you know damn well it’s bigger on the inside.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said.” Droid’s dark brown eyes glinted unmercifully at me. “Come on, Ironspell, live a little. You know damn well you don’t have a chance with Samantha Hotter because she’s dating Tyler the Hulk.”
I glared. “She’s not into werewolves, even if he is on the Buffs football team.”
“Then, why is she dating him? How do you know she doesn’t go furry?”
“I heard from her roommate’s friend who overheard Samantha talking to her roommate that she didn’t like Tyler because he’s a shifter. She’d rather date a wizard.”
“Who said that?” Droid blinked.
“Ashley Smith.” I crossed my arms as if daring him to poke holes in my only hope of dating my dream girl.
“Oh, that’s a reputable source. Remember the last time you took Ash’s advice?”
Unfortunately, I did. And that got me suspended from classes for a semester. “Hey, I got that cleared up and off the record.”
“Only because your mom pulled in a bunch of favors.” Droid snickered again. “Look, Ironspell, I don’t need to tell you that you’ll just end up a sad sack at the end of the night. The girls are big into the flossy blond types and you are anything but. You’re more likely to score with Ash than you are with Sam. So, why don’t you join me and do some fanger payback?”
He had a point, but I bristled at the reminder. I had dark hair that was almost black and dark eyes. And I couldn’t grow a decent beard to save my life, suggesting that maybe I had Elven heritage. “Because I’d rather take my chances with the girls. Anyway, where’d you get the bats?”
“I branched out in my pest control business.” Droid grinned. “Seems a lot of Boulder residents have bats in the belfry.”
“You mean bats in the attic?”
“Yeah, that too.” He laughed at his lame joke.
“Do you even have a license to do pest control?” I looked at him skeptically.
“Yeah, I gave myself one after hacking into the state’s system. Piece of cake, really. They don’t employ technomages there.”
I sighed. “I don’t know…”
“Come on. It’ll be fun. We can add to the spooky ambiance of the vamp estates. They’ll probably pay us, seeing how good of work we do. Anyway, vampires like bats.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re releasing bats and expect them to stay there? You know, they’ll just fly back to the peoples’ houses they were inhabiting in the first place.”
“I call it ‘customer retention.’” Droid shrugged. “Come on, Ironspell. You know you want to do this at least once. Afterwards we’ll hit the bars and get a couple of beers. My treat. I triple dog dare you.”
Now, you may not know what a triple dog dare is, but to a man, especially a twenty year old, it’s the ultimate dare that you can’t back down on or you admit you’re not manly enough to do it. And I was twenty years old, which meant I couldn’t back down. “All right.” I sighed. “If for nothing else to shut you up.” There’d be other Halloweens and I knew deep down inside he was right. I had virtually no chance getting a date with Samantha Hotter. I might as well do something Droid thought was fun. And for a free beer, I’d be up to just about anything.
~ * ~
If you haven’t figured out by now, most people call me “Ironspell,” although my name is really Bob Ironspell-Cabas. Yeah, the hyphen is the merger of my parents’ last names. My mom, Sabine Cabas, is a hedge witch of some renown who operates a wizard and witch supply shop in Evergreen, Colorado. My dad was a wizard who died before I was born. Apparently the wizarding house of Ironspell was big in its heyday, but it appears that I’m the last of the line and no one seems to know much about them anymore.
Other than the cool name, Ironspell, I don’t know much about my family. I inherited my parents’ magical aptitude, but most of the magic I’ve learned is theory and not really practical. I don’t blame the University for that—it wasn’t that long ago when the Supernaturals outed themselves and the Normals learned that they were sharing a world filled with magic and magical creatures. There’s still a fair amount of friction between Normals and Supes, but somehow we’ve all coexisted without blowing ourselves up. Yet.
Droid and I are Juniors at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We’re on the undergraduate technomage track—that’s how we met. Droid has had more exposure to tech magic than I have, since his Dad works as a technomage for an aerospace company down in Colorado Springs near Peterson Airforce Base. Which is ironic because Droid hates vampires and yuppies, even though his family is kind of yuppie compared to mine. I haven’t bothered to point that out to him.
Sunset in Boulder on Halloween is around 6:00 pm, which means we had about a half hour of usable light to get down to Highlands Ranch, south of Denver. Droid and I caught dinner early at the local pizzeria and I rode shotgun in his black Ford pickup as we drove south. In the truck’s bed were a variety of cages covered with cloth that I assumed were filled with mice and bats.
“You sure you didn’t catch any vampires when you caught those bats?” I asked as we drove down I-36 to merge onto I-25 just north of Denver.
Droid scowled and ran his hand through his hippie-long hair. “Shit, you believe those stories?”
“Yeah, I do.” I stared at him. “Vampires can turn into bats.”
“No, they can’t. That’s all a bunch of bullshit. Vampires can’t change form and they certainly can’t violate physics.”
“How would they violate physics?” I glanced at the road signs. We had just passed Glendale and it was already dark. I didn’t relish releasing animals in a strange place at night.
“Conservation of mass?” He glanced at me.
“Like we don’t violate physics with magic?”
“Totally different.” He snorted derisively.
I fell silent and watched us pass each exit until we arrived at C-470. The highways were typically packed with commuters as well as people trying to get to their chosen party. The cops were out in force ticketing speeders and pulling over possible DUIs. I wondered if this little excursion Droid roped me into would hurt my chances getting accepted to the Denver Wizard Task Force or DWTF. What we were going to do was technically illegal, but like all good pranks, this one was mostly harmless. Mostly. It certainly wasn’t as bad as getting drunk at a bar with our fake IDs—which we were planning to do after our prank—since we were underage for drinking.
Droid took the exit to Highlands Ranch and I almost immediately regretted accepting the triple dog dare. What used to be mainly suburbia looked more like a war zone with boarded up houses and zombies shambling down the streets in what few street lights were still working. What once had been the heart of suburbia and upper middle class streets filled with McMansions and cookie-cutter housing for the mostly affluent had changed over to boarded-up tract homes and weeds that no HOA would’ve put up with. Most of the homes had been bulldozed to make room for sprawling vampire mansions and honest-to-god castles that took a page out of Transylvania. The few homes that remained intact were homes for the servants and the groupies of the fang bangers. Often the servants and groupies were one in the same, which meant that like crack addicts, these people didn’t really give a shit where they lived as long as they were near their source. You see, vampire bites often stimulate the pleasure centers in the brain, just like heroin and crack, meaning once y
It’s funny because doctors are actually recommending illicit drugs over vampire bites for health reasons.
“You’ve had your shots, right?” Droid’s voice brought me from my reverie.
“Yeah, sure—got them boosted before I started college.” I glanced at him. “Did you?”
“Oh yeah.” Droid nodded emphatically. “But if you get bit tonight, you might want to go to the infirmary and get boosted again to be on the safe side. I should’ve asked if your mom was an antivaxxer, but she didn’t seem like the type. You know, she’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah, she is.” I winced.
“She still giving you shit about wanting to be a cop?”
“Yeah.” I sighed and looked out at the shambler that we passed by. By his torn up clothing, he looked like he had been a business man at one time. He wore a tore up three piece suit and was still carrying a beat-to-shit brief case. I idly wondered if he dropped the case when he went after prey.
“She’s got a point. You should come with me to MIT and get your technomage masters instead of dinking around with applying to the police academy.”
“Are we there yet?” I stared out the window.
Droid shook his head at my evasion. “Yeah, almost. It’ll be a little thick with zombies, but most are shamblers, so we should be able to avoid them easily.”
“The vamps make all of them?” I shuddered.
“Most, although some of the poor bastards got caught by a runner. That’s another reason I hate fangers—they don’t clean up after they eat.”
The idea that you’d be turned into a vampire if you’re drained is only partially true. In most cases, the vamps weren’t powerful enough to create another vampire from a human and they ended up zombies. Even so, people stood in line to get drained and hopefully get their shot at immortality.
Only the poor bastards shambling around us were proof enough the turnings didn’t always happen the way they were supposed to. Most were shamblers, but occasionally you’d get a more active zombie that could outrun you. Hence the terms shamblers and runners. Our vaccinations wouldn’t save our asses from being eaten, but at least we wouldn’t get turned into a fang banger or a zombie.
Droid pulled his Ford pickup onto a darkened street and we both climbed out. I cast a soft mage light so we could see and not be entirely surprised when the zombies shambled towards us. Droid loosened the bungies and pulled the tarps to reveal cages upon cages of rats, mice, and yes, bats. The bats flapped around in the cage like frenzied claustrophobic mimes on a sugar rush and I took a step back as Droid opened the cage.
The bats poured out in a dark wave. I watched both terrified and entranced by their erratic movements.
“Uh-oh,” Droid said.
I looked back at the cage to see a vampire lying listlessly half in and out of the cage, covered with bat shit.
Chapter Two
“I thought you said vampires couldn’t turn into bats.” I pointed at the semi-conscious vampire in the bed of Droid’s truck. Yeah he was covered with bat shit or guano—I guess that’s the scientific term—and was groaning pathetically.
“Apparently I was wrong.” Droid looked at the vampire. “Got a stake or something silver?”
“No, why would I carry that?”
“I don’t know, maybe in case you run into a vampire?” Droid shook his head. “Go back into the cab and look behind the seats. I’ve got a couple of wooden stakes there.”
I crossed my arms. “We are not going to kill him.”
“No, we’re not.” Droid nodded. “He’s already dead—we’re just going to make it more permanent.”
“Look, I am not killing a vampire. That’s a crime, even if you don’t think it’s one.”
“It’s also a crime if he drains us.” Droid toward the cab. “Don’t be a weenie and grab a stake. We may need it regardless.”
He had a point, pun not intended. I rushed back and accepted the wooden stake from him as he fished it out from behind the seat—a broom handle that had been cut and whittled to a sharp end. He held one too and we both went back to the bloodsucker in the hopes that maybe he had already fed.
The vamp groaned again and I got a good look at him this time. He was maybe a bit shorter than my height of six feet and looked about our age. But looks were deceiving on a vampire; they maintained whatever age they were when they were turned. So, we could be looking at a powerful master vampire or just a newbie. There was no way to tell and even when I used my magical sight, it pretty much gave me nothing. Corpses really don’t show up when you look at auras, so there was no sense in trying. I had heard of other ways to see magic, but I wouldn’t learn how until my senior year.
Anyway, you can always tell a bloodsucker by their pale skin and large canine teeth. Most of the time vampires keep their fangs retracted so you can’t tell if the person just despises the sun or if they’re undead unless you look for their aura. This guy definitely didn’t have one, which made him just a walking corpse with an affinity for blood. I don’t get what people think is so sexy about fucking something room temperature that could kill you, but hey, if you’re into necrophilia, that’s none of my business.
The fanger looked harmless, which is why we both hovered over him, trying to decide what to do. Suddenly, he moved with blinding speed and latched onto Droid, fangs out, ready to bite. Droid’s eyes were wide in fear; the fang banger had knocked the stake out of Droid’s hands, effectively disarming him. Droid tried to pull away, but the vampire held him firm as he lowered his head to take a bite at the jugular.
“Solaris!” I shouted and my mage light went from dim to sunshine bright. The vamp hissed and withdrew, his body smoking under the sun-like rays. He scuttled away, just outside the brightest ring of light.
Droid slumped and patted his neck where the vampire intended to bite. “Wow, fast thinking.” Despite all Droid’s normal bravo, I could see he was grateful I had saved him from a feeding. He walked over and picked up the stake, never letting his eyes off the fanger.
“Hey you!” I shouted at the vampire. “What’s your name?”
The vampire hissed and shook his head. He held up his arms to shield him from the light. “Can you turn that thing off?”
“No can do, sweetheart.” I gave him my best Captain Kirk imitation of a gangster in “A Piece of the Action.” Droid snickered, getting the joke, but the fanger was oblivious. He scowled at me. “What’s your name?” I repeated.
“Justin,” he grumbled.
“Oh great, a millennial bloodsucker.” Droid rolled his eyes.
“Thanks for letting me out of the trap…” Justin brushed off the guano with disdain.
“So you try to feed off of one of us as a thank you?” I looked at him skeptically.
“Hey, I’m hungry. Your buddy hadn’t fed us since he caught us.” He pointed at Droid.
“It was only a day,” Droid muttered.
“Hey, I get low blood sugar.” Justin looked around. “You guys wouldn’t have any blood bags on you?”
Great, we got the hypoglycemic bloodsucker.
“Fresh out. I didn’t think we’d be dealing with a vampire.”
“Can I at least get a nibble—it’ll hardly hurt.”
“Oh, hell no.” Droid and I spoke at once and the vamp winced.
“Okay, I get it. No blood for me until we get to a late night convenience store. Do you know if the 7-11s around here carry blood?”
“No idea.” I cocked my head as I thought of something. “Hey, what were you doing in someone’s house anyway?”
“Yeah, that’s right. I had those traps in the sororities.” Droid snapped his fingers. Seeing my look, he shrugged. “I have an exclusive contract with them.”
“I like to watch,” Justin said.
“Oh man, that is like so creepy and wrong, dude.” I said.
“Fang banger. That’s why I hate vampires.” Droid nodded as though that confirmed our newest problem’s behavior.
“You can’t blame a guy…” He looked at us in disbelief. “Come on, if you could turn into a bat, you’d do it too.”
“Actually, we wouldn’t,” I said.
“You two gay or something?” He looked skeptically from one to the other.
