“You know what I mean. Trophy girlfriends have to make you look good in front of your friends. Here that means no smoking. The next place I go hunting, it will be somewhere like France or Japan. Somewhere they don’t believe they’ll live forever if they give up everything that gives them pleasure.”
“Speaking of you hunting, I still don’t know much of anything about you. You’re like Van Helsing in drag, but you have a whole public life on video. How does your life go that way?”
“What don’t you understand? The revenants or the pornography?”
“I understand the porn. Lots of Sub Rosa and Lurkers do it out here. But I’ve never met a professional Drifter exterminator before. How does that end up the family business?”
“The Hussites ate my grandmother.”
“That was going to be my second guess. What are Hussites?”
“Protestants. They were angry over corruption in the Church and the Church rewarded them by burning their leader, Jan Hus, at the stake. My village didn’t care. They were all fools to us. But the Hussites and the government went to war, and monsters, which love nothing more than chaos, came with them. One evening, a Hussite band came to our village. They took as much food as they could carry and some goats and left. We cursed them, but would have saved our curses if we had known what was to follow. More soldiers came, but these were different. They were ragged and stank of death. Some were little more than bones and none of them spoke. Grandmother was a ÄarodÄ?jnice. A witch. She and the other old women, with nuns from a local convent, went together to drive off the ghost soldiers. They carried Bibles and my grandmother and the old women carried potions and magical objects. None of them ever returned.”
“Damn.”
“Two days later, a few of the women and the nuns returned, including Grandmother. But it was not really her. She was nude. The flesh from her breasts, her belly, and her legs had been eaten away. Most of her face was gone, but Grandfather recognized her and went to her. She gouged out his eyes and devoured him in the main room of our little house, under the crucifix her mother had given them at their wedding.”
“You didn’t have to kill them yourself, did you?”
“This happened six hundred years ago, so no, I didn’t, but we still remember.”
“So your people decided to go after the ghost soldiers.”
“The bravest, boldest men went after them that night. They all were eaten or turned into revenants themselves. Other men were able to capture a few of the beasts and, over time, we learned how to destroy them. After that, my family were no longer farmers. We were killers. Like you. And like you, we do whatever we have to do to live and continue our work.”
“You don’t have to justify anything to me.”
“I know. That’s why I’ll tell you this. Normal people, Simon’s sort of people, wouldn’t understand.”
“You definitely win the deep-dark-secrets competition. I never hid anything that good.”
“What about your magic? You must have kept that secret.”
“I didn’t know any better when I was a kid, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late.”
“Poor Jimmy. Full of magic and happy to use it. Doomed to beat the boys at all their games and do tricks for the girls to make them kiss you.”
“I didn’t have a car. I had to do something.”
“I’ll light a candle for you.”
“Don’t waste the wax. They don’t take my calls anymore.”
I get Brigitte to hold the wheel while I tap out a cigarette, light up, and take a big puff. Instantly, I’m Doc Holliday trying to cough up a lung.
“God. They’re menthols.”
I toss the rest of the pack, including the one I’m smoking, out the window. I’m doing the Lexus owner a favor ditching those nerve-gas sticks. He’ll whine when he realizes they’re gone, but sometimes tough love is the only answer.
The street across from the vacant lot on East Sixth is empty. I kill the engine and the lights and we sit for a minute watching the place. In the moonlight the Springheels’ hovel looks like a cardboard cutout left out in the rain. I don’t see anyone standing guard.
Brigitte leans across me and looks out the window.
“That’s the house of an important family?”
“The most important once upon a time.”
“I think you Sub Rosa have a different sense of beauty than other people.”