That Night in Lagos (7 page)

As I reflected on the predicament of Inspector Jones and the obnoxious wet heat pressing down upon me, I drifted off into a slumber. I’m certain I would have remained thus except for a disturbing dream involving a talking chimp shape-shifting into a mermaid. My sleep interrupted, I lay in the darkness, blinking away the heaviness of mind that accompanies a long nap, wondering what else was disquieting me.

Darkness.

It was dark, which indicated that it was well past dusk. The obvious and simplistic nature of that thought further befuddled my sleep-addled mind, until I identified why such a statement should cause me distress: Inspector Jones had not come for me.

While there were many possible explanations for this, I was confident that only two had the highest probability of being true: either he sincerely intended to fetch me, and this unexpected and uncharacteristic tardiness could only be proof that he was dead; or he had decided to save me the inconvenience of a trip to the piers and had proceeded without me.

“The imbecile,”
I muttered as I stumbled into action. The description was accurate either way, for if he was indeed dead, it was due to his overuse of snuff and his underuse of imagination; if he had declined my services, then he was entering into a situation for which he was ill prepared.

As this wasn’t London with its plethora of carriages, I decided to set off on foot for the port, which wasn’t that far away given the diminutive size of Lagos. Mrs. Pritchard was appalled at the notion.

“But my dear,”
she said, her hands clenched together as if imploring me to reconsider, her energy thoroughly agitated. “This is not the sort of place where one ventures out into the streets unaccompanied, particularly for a proper Englishwoman and specifically at night. There are all sorts of vagabonds and undesirables roaming about.”

At that I smiled, my irritation at any delay mollified by her pained expression and sincere concern for my wellbeing. “Do not fret, Mrs. Pritchard, for I’m hardly proper and I am in fact accompanied.”

With that, I raised my fully loaded walking stick and ventured out into the darkness. My eyes —
those strangely colored orbs —
adjusted to the gloom which only the inconstant light of stars softened. Despite Mrs. Pritchard’s assertions that there were thugs and goons skulking about each street corner, I found the town to be remarkably absent of loiterers. I wasn’t at all alarmed by the solitude, far from it, for it meant I could proceed to my destination without the nuisance of having to thump sense into a bandit or two.

Inspector Jones and his cohorts were far too easy to spot, at least for me. I merely had to squint and their energy popped up as clear as fireworks. They squatted in several loose clump behind stacks of crates conveniently placed along the port, near the entrance of a warehouse that loomed over them. I studied the piers before proceeding; the police were the only energy sources in the area apart from the mosquitos and rodents. Whatever was supposed to happen hadn’t yet begun.

I joined the Inspector in his shadowy hiding spot. His facial features tightened further when he realized who had joined him. He cursed and inhaled a pinch of snuff. While I wasn’t particularly impressed with his behavior, I was rather concerned about his increased use of the narcotic. In my limited experience thus far, a drug-addled mind was an unreliable one, and was a certain recipe for death and other inconveniences.

“Surely you’ve had enough of that,”
I muttered under my breath.

“Surely you shouldn’t be here,”
Inspector Jones muttered back.

I sighed and could only hope that he lived long enough to prove himself useful, or at least not a hindrance. While in my younger years I would’ve experienced a trace of womanly concern and sympathy for a man who insisted on handing his mind over to a drug, I had rapidly learned over the previous year working for the Society that such tender sentimentality was a dangerous distraction.

I continued upon such internal deliberations to pass the time while occasionally scanning the area for signs of humanoid life. It was during such a scan that I noticed the Obayifo. He was standing at the other end of the pier, his skin darker than the sky that framed his tall and muscular form.

“We have company,”
I whispered to Inspector Jones and gestured with my chin in the general direction.

“I don’t see a blasted thing,”
he said and scowled at me as if it was my fault the man was blind at night.

“You will,”
I reassured him and just as I spoke, another humanoid joined the Obayifo and providentially held up a lantern. The men near me shifted in anticipation, flexing their muscles in preparation for action. Inspector Jones glanced askew at me but declined to remark on my ability to see in darkness.

Several more humans joined the first. I wondered if they were cognizant of the vampire sorcerer’s true nature, for they all remained in a huddle, several steps away from the Obayifo. Or perhaps they instinctually knew to maintain a distance, as any prey does around its predator.

The Obayifo glanced down at the man with the lantern and nodded. Wordlessly, the humans formed a chain that began in the shadows behind a nearby warehouse and ended on the deck of a small ship. Wooden crates were passed along and deposited on a boat. I knew what must be in those crates: enslaved Brownies.

Inspector Jones nudged the man next to him and the unspoken command passed down the line. I could imagine the other groups of police officers also preparing themselves for the attack.

“Leave the Obayifo to me,”
I whispered to the Inspector.

The man hesitated, irritation and acquiescence warring across his countenance. He must’ve recognized at one level that he was no match for the vampire, despite his decade of experience. Eventually practicality triumphed over pride. He nodded curtly, and then proceeded to ignore me, which suited me very well. The fingers of one of my hands tapped along my walking stick as I pondered what weapon to extract from the device, while my other hand patted the pouch of powdered cinnamon in my skirt pocket.

A preternatural silence enveloped the scene, when time itself held its breath and the soft slap of bare feet against the wooden pier was muffled by the intensity of the moment. I could feel rather than hear the men about me inhaling deeply, preparing for the charge. The Inspector was the first to stand up, and the other officers sprang out of their hiding places and launched themselves at the slave traders.

The quiet shattered into chaos as men erupted into action all about me. The fervor of the police officers’
determination was evenly matched by the traders’
desperation, and a battle ensued for which the Africans were poorly prepared.

The Obayifo however was unperturbed. A light began to radiate about him, tentacles of energy stretching out and grasping the minds of the men nearest him. Those officers thus touched fell into a palsy, incapable of voluntary movement, their limbs quivering. Their slack mouths and eyes lit up with a light that mirrored in color the globe surrounding the sorcerer.

“Most peculiar,”
I said as my fingers settled on a knob that opened a shallow ledge built into my walking stick. A blowgun hardly longer than my hand was snuggled against a few darts tipped with enough narcotics to incapacitate a grown man, even one as sizable as the vampire.

As if divining my intentions from the other side of the impromptu battlefield, the Obayifo swiveled to face my location, his eyes narrowing in recognition. With a sneer, he hurtled through the men, his glowing eyes fixed on me, his form weaving around and leaping over fallen crates and thus denying me a fixed target.

“How very inconsiderate,”
I muttered as I gingerly dug a dart out and inserted it into the blowgun. Then again, vampires didn’t tend to be overly complacent when faced with their possible demise, and the African version displayed no better manners in this regard.

I lifted the blowgun to my lips and was about to blow a long night of sleep into the Obayifo when a set of hands clamped themselves about my waist and snatched me away, thus spoiling my shot. Instead the dart flew wildly off course and sunk into the backside of one of the smugglers, who promptly collapsed to the wooden decking.

“Miss Bee, you’re in the way,”
the Inspector shouted at me as he pushed me aside and slashed a saber at the vampire.

Fuming, I snapped, “How very valiant of you, sir, but so are you.”

“Not now, madam,”
he interrupted me as he leaped atop a crate and used his superior position to discourage his adversary from proceeding toward me. “To begin with, your presence here is outside of protocol.”

“A pox on English propriety,”
I said as I attempted to secure another shot, but the Obayifo, having assessed the situation and observing that most of his men were captured or otherwise incapacitated, had transformed into a large globe of light and was floating away beyond the reach of any projectile we had at hand. Only the Inspector and I were in a position to observe the creature’s unique escape, and I wondered how the experience would impact the man’s increased reliance on narcotics.

While I was in a huff over the lost opportunity, I couldn’t entirely fault the Inspector and we had, after all, captured the majority of the smugglers. But even as the officers congratulated each other in restrained voices, I couldn’t help but wonder if their felicity was a tad premature.

Brownies, being the clever creatures they are, can appear very much like little humans. When the officers began cracking open the crates, they saw human children crawl out. The children, I knew, would be delivered into the care of a nearby church, after which they would be shipped off to an orphanage in England, from which they would eventually escape and return to their forest homes.

Leaving a few of the officers behind to liberate the Brownies, Inspector Jones and the remainder of his men rounded up the smugglers and filled up the holding cell in the dank basement of the constabulary. While the Inspector wished nothing more than to disassociate himself from me, he couldn’t very well refuse my request to join him. He contented himself with a bit of snuff and a stiff-lipped, self-congratulatory comment: “You see there, Miss Bee, my men and I managed very well in the end.”

I remained silent, keeping my counsel to myself and resisting the urge to remind the man that we hadn’t captured the ringleader. The Obayifo had also escaped, thanks to the Inspector’s gentlemanly need to rescue a damsel who hadn't been at all in distress. I was certain the vampire sorcerer was floating his way back to his master. A disquiet settled on me like a sodden cloak, and the cheers of the officers did nothing to dispel it.

Once all the sullen-faced smugglers were locked away, the Inspector and I began to question them, although I suspected we would have as much success with them as we had with the driver: that is to say, none. Inspector Jones however was in an ebullient mood, his confidence buoyed by the successful attack and the snuff he now imbibed nearly hourly.

“Watch and learn, Miss Bee,”
he said over my voiced concerns. “If your delicate, womanly constitution will allow it, that is.”

I restrained an unwomanly snort at that comment, for my constitution was anything but delicate. To admit to a lack of feminine frailty however would serve me not at all, so I again didn’t voice my judgments and instead joined the Inspector in the interrogation room.

On the pier, the smugglers had appeared as tough, insolent hooligans. In the small, gloomy cell that stank of mildew and unbathed bodies, isolated from their leader, they still were the hardened thugs but their eyes were downcast and nervous.

The first man we interrogated was the one who’d held the lantern for the Obayifo. He was a burly fellow, his body well accustomed to carrying loads. By the tilt of his chin and the unwavering nature of his gaze, I deduced he was also accustomed to relaying commands and expecting results. He wasn’t as intimidated as the others by his current predicament. After some prodding and coaxing as to his name, he stated in a surly voice, “I am Jumuka.”

“John,”
the Inspector said, writing the name in his notebook.

I frowned. “That’s not what he said at all.”

The Inspector shrugged. “Close enough. All right then, John, tell us where your base of operation is.”

I squinted in order to study Jumuka’s energy field and could readily discern that we wouldn’t extract much more information than what we had just received.