Chapter Forty-One
Chapter
Forty-One
Dante—the human one
I shove a hand through my hair. It’s long, hanging
past my earlobes. Normally it doesn’t bother me, but I’m pretty sure it makes
me look grungy in front of the pretty woman sitting in my store. Not that
perfectly combed hair would help since I’m dressed like the nerd I am. I smooth
my hands over my slightly wrinkled Lex Luthor for President T-shirt.
Why did I put off the laundry? And why does it matter? The chick hasn’t come to
try to date me.
I’m listening to the craziest story I’ve heard. She’s been
talking for the last hour and a half. The redhead is hot but completely insane.
She thinks vampires are real. She also believes in faeries
and demons and hags. She’s sure she spent the last couple of weeks on another
plane of existence. According to her, there are many planes, some easily
accessible, some not.
She’s bonkers.
Except I played around with the computer she showed me. It’s
far more advanced than anything I’ve seen before. No one in the industry is
even talking about a system that can do the things this one can. We’re decades
away from this kind of tech. What I hold in my hands is a supercomputer. It
stores so much information that I can’t even think of a name for the capacity.
It blows past terabytes. It has a connection to an Internet but claims there’s
no connectivity here. I played around and got the system to acknowledge my
wireless connection. The superhot hostess was unimpressed. She asked me why I
wanted her to connect to such a primitive system and promptly downloaded the
whole of the global Internet.
The whole fucking thing, and it didn’t slow down for a
second.
“Where did you get this?” I ask.
The woman named Meg rolls her eyes. “I told you. Your
vampire counterpart gave it to me.”
Yes, how could I forget that part. There are many planes of
existence and one of them is a Vampire plane. I’m a royal there. I work for
Dellacorp, and it’s a huge corporation that my family owns. My vampire
counterpart obviously has it better than I do. I run this shitty two-bit store
I inherited from my father and is going nowhere fast.
The other Dante sounds like a guy who gets an enormous
amount of tail. He pulls, if you know what I mean.
“As far as I can tell, this thing is nuclear powered,” I
point out in amazement. “How can that be possible? And I think it took my blood
a couple of minutes ago. It thinks I’m not edible. What’s up with that?”
“Dante, well, the other Dante, he goes to a lot of different
planes.” Meg sips the coffee I made and continues. “The computer is set to test
potential food sources. I’m afraid it’s decided you’re toxic.” She looks at the
screen. “Too much pollution, and wow, apparently you have a lot of sugar in
your system.”
Without much thought, I eat the second half of the Twinkie
I’ve been downing. Does it bother me that vampires don’t consider me proper
food? Nope. It’s a plus. If those bloodsuckers are real and deeply concerned
with blood sugar, pass me a cupcake, please.
“The vamps here would probably love you, though,” Meg says
with a bright smile. “According to what I’ve read, they’re not as picky.”
“Good to know.” So the Dr Pepper I’m enjoying won’t save me
here. I still drink it. “So, let’s say I buy this whole crazy story of yours.”
This is the time when I look around again for the hidden cameras. If I had any
friends, I would think they are punking me. “What exactly is it you want me to
do?”
She chews on her lower lip, her nervousness apparent. “I
need you to help me get back.”
“And how am I supposed to do that, sweetheart?” I ask. “I’m
not exactly a…Planeswalker demon.” That’s what she called them. Yes, she
believes in demons, too. “How am I supposed to find this door you’re looking
for?”
Her hazel eyes fill with tears. She really believes the
story. “I don’t know. I only know that you’re here, and you’re going to help
me. I believe it. It wasn’t random coincidence that I found myself here. It was
fate.”
I’m not so sure about that, but there’s no denying the
technology she showed me. I want it. If I have to do some Internet searches to
placate the girl, I’ll do it. Besides, she’s hot. Maybe when she realizes
there’s nowhere else to go, she’ll turn to me. I can comfort her. It’s a nice
prospect. My brain starts working overtime. I’m going to look at it as a
problem to solve, like I’m taking the whole doorway to another plane shit
seriously. After all, she dropped this piece of future tech into my lap. I kind
of owe her.
“Okay, so no one knows where these doors are, right?”
Her pretty hair shakes around her shoulders. “No, most of
them are well-defined. People move easily through them. The door to this plane
is hard to find, and I think there’s more than one. I don’t know why. And
there’s a whole supernatural world apparently. If we could find the vampire
council here, that would be very helpful. Maybe they have a president or
something we could talk to. Or a king.”
“Nice. Yeah, I don’t know where that is,” I reply. She’s
taking surrealism to a whole different place. I respect it. “The door might be
more helpful. So we have to suspect that this door is here in the city. Is it
open all the time?”
“More than likely not,” Meg explains. “The other doors
aren’t always open. I read that some people can open them at will, but others
have to wait. The door from my village’s plane to the Vampire plane opens twice
a day. I think we can assume the door here is something like that. It’s
somewhere in the city. I don’t think I was out very long.”
“So there’s a door to a different plane right here in Fort
Worth,” I muse. “It can’t be in an office building. Someone would probably
notice a door opening to a faery world a couple of times a day. I bet weird
stuff happens around it. It’s a long shot, but this baby is pretty cool.” I
push the button that brings up the menu. “I need to run a search.”
“Of course, master,” the computer says with an inviting
smile. “Which pornographic material should I seek out today?”
Oh, I totally glossed over the fun parts of this tech.
“Really? You can do that?” I feel Meg’s stare. Judgment. There’s a whole lot of
judgment in her eyes. I clear my throat and get back to business. “Nothing like
that. I want you to run a search on all strange happenings in the city of Fort
Worth, Texas. Use the human Internet, the primitive, sucky one. Check things
like police reports and news articles and even blogs. I need a list of
locations around the city where strange things happen.”
The hostess bows her head and winks out of existence to
start her search.
“There,” I say to Meg. She’s looking at a photograph I keep
on my desk. “We’ll have someplace to search soon.”
Meg’s face goes soft as she looks at the picture of four men
in tuxedoes. They’re all smiling, with their arms around each other’s
shoulders. I know the photograph well. I took it myself. “The twins are my
cousins. They’re from Ireland.”
She nods and almost reverently touches the picture. “Their
hair is short. It looks good, though. Why are they wearing tuxedoes? And who
are the other men? Do they have other brothers on this plane?”
I’m used to women drooling over my very attractive cousins.
No one pays me a bit of attention when Beck and Ci are around. Not that it
would help them. It gives me great pleasure to tell her where the picture was
taken. “Nope. Just a sister. They all live in Dublin. Those men are Beck and
Cian’s husbands. I took that picture at their commitment ceremony.”
Meg’s eyes widen, and she drags me forward by the neck of my
T-shirt. Her teeth are clenched, and she shakes me lightly. “You have to get me
out of here. This isn’t my home. I don’t like it. Everything is wrong here.”
“Jeez,” I say, holding my hands up in submission. “I’m
working on it, babe. Why don’t you go upstairs? I have an apartment up there.
You can take the bed. I’m going to stay up and play with this a little more. I
don’t sleep much at night, anyway. Never have.”
Meg nods. She looks exhausted. Crazy or not, she obviously
had an emotional day. “Thank you, Dante. I really appreciate this. I know it
will work. It has to.”
She starts up the stairs. I’m not so sure it will work, but
I am starting to believe her story. I know one thing, though, as I stare at the
magnificent machine in front of me—my life has just changed forever.