Free Deader Still by Anton Strout Page B

but she didn’t move. “Just come on over after you’re done here. I’ll be home. I hope you and Thaddeus have a great time researching.”
    I wish I hadn’t said it, but it was too late. I walked away before I could make it any worse that it already was, but Jane let out a heavy sigh as I went. I never would have thought the hardest thing to deal with back in the Black Stacks would be my girlfriend.
     

7
    I headed back downtown for my appointment with the Inspectre, going over what had just happened and wondering why my inner alpha male had flared up so much over Wesker. How had a little light instruction on combating the undead turned into a fit of jealousy?
    Things with Jane had been going great. Well, as great as they could be for an ex-cultist and a psychometric detective with little experience in long-term dating, anyway. I cursed the years I hadn’t been able to control my power. They had kept me from ever having a relationship successful enough to get to this stage of emotional irrationality.
    Now that I was confused and full of steam to blow off, it was the perfect time to head back to the D.E.A. for that Fraternal Order of Goodness-level Unorthodox Fighting Techniques the Inspectre had mentioned. When I got there, I wove my way through an area upstairs that was a labyrinth of musty old offices but with slightly emptier corridors because of the restrictive exclusivity of F.O.G. The furniture was ancient, as if the minds of ages had been battling evil here for centuries, and after several wrong turns, I found Inspectre Quimbley in one of the training areas, suiting up in elbow pads that he was slipping on over his tweed coat.
    The Inspectre looked up and gave me a fatherly smile.
    “Almost ready,” he said.
    He slipped on his protective headgear, the kind a boxer wears, and over his chest he pulled on an umpire’s padded vest with a large red heart painted where one would expect the actual heart to be, only it had a target on it. The padding made him appear even more walruslike than his mustache did, but I knew all too well that was only in appearance. Looks could be deceiving with Inspectre Quimbley. You didn’t live to be his age in his field unless you had serious skills.
    “You F.O.G.gies don’t mess around when it comes to fighting,” I said.
    The Inspectre was still giving me that paternal look when he stood up. “The forces of Darkness certainly don’t mess around when it comes to attacking us, so why should we hold back? Especially vampires. I’d rather have you prepared, my boy, than dead. Now, then …”
    He pulled a long black cape off the back of the chair he had been sitting in. As he tied it on, I almost laughed. I was pretty much looking at a walruslike version of Count Dracula. He scooped up an enchanted coatrack in both his hands and brandished it like it was a staff. The little metal coat hooks at the top of it snaked to life like tiny metal pincers. All of this certainly helped dissipate the patriarchal mood and any humor.
    I looked around the general clutter of the room for something weapon-y of my own.
    “That’s your first mistake,” the Inspectre said.
    “Sir?”
    “Unorthodox Fighting Techniques at this level provides very little in the way of conventional weaponry. Open your mind to the art of improvisation during conflict. Few fights ever go as smoothly as they look in the movies, do they? You never know under what circumstance you might be called upon to defend yourself. Or with what.”
    I missed the lower levels of this class. In those, I had fought with weapons like carnivorous sofa cushions, fire stokers that kept blowing soot into my face, potted trees that screamed when you hit them, pool cues, fountain pens, living lawn gnomes, and once, purely by accident, normal swords.
    This time, however, nothing really jumped out to me and I was at a loss.
    “You’ve already got the best weapon,” I said, backing away. Even the length of the coatrack gave it a