Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (24 page)

There was a reason vampires existed. There was a reason humans existed.
There was a pattern to it all
, just as Claire had said.
 

He hadn’t found the codex because the codex wasn’t a thing to be found. It had been right there all along, in plain sight, shattered and spread to the corners of experience. His mind was already putting the pieces together, the same as Claire had, before sending him on his futile errand.

Claire was destined to send Reginald to find the codex.
 

Reginald was destined to fail. To watch the world fall. To lose his maker, who would give his life for his progeny and wake the sleeper inside of that progeny — so that Reginald, who held the entirety of vampire knowledge in his veins, could do what needed to be done.
 

Reginald’s task wasn’t to
find
the codex, but to
assemble
it.
 

Humans and vampires.
 

Vampires and humans.
 

The two species weren’t predator and prey. They were symbionts. Vampires couldn’t exist without humans and humans couldn’t exist without vampires. It was all so obvious. They were like two varieties of fruit trees: you couldn’t grow a single blueberry bush; you had to have two different strains so that they could cross-pollenate. Humans and vampires were each other’s natural check. They were
each other’s
predators.
 

Reginald’s mind showed him the image of a seed cracking open in the heat of a forest fire. It showed him the image of a blade being drawn across a grinding stone.
 

Vampires weren’t the stronger of the two species.
Humans
were. They’d forgotten that, but Reginald, with his new sense of vision, could see that they were. And what’s more, there was one — and
only
one — way that humans could be made to remember their own strength: pressure from their antagonists. If they were pushed hard enough by vampires, the humans would bloom like a seed forced open by the heat of a fire — like a knife ground hard enough against a stone to gain a razor’s edge.
 

Reginald felt the codex’s shards begin to come together in his mind. It had been there all along.
All along.
 

But as Reginald watched the pieces assemble in his mind, he realized that the codex didn’t tell a story about vampires eliminating humans. It told a story about humans eliminating vampires.
 

The thought caused Reginald to yank himself back through the maze of blood memory to the present. When he came out of his fugue, he realized he was shaking. He was slouched on the couch in front of the TV in the basement of Maurice’s mansion, blinking at the bright room lights. Nikki was beside him, her hands on his arm, gently shaking him with wide, compassionate eyes.

“It’s okay, Reginald,” she said, soothing him out of what she’d taken for a nightmare. “I’m here. You’re awake. It’s okay.”
 

“It’s not okay,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The war,” he said.
 

She blinked, not understanding. The statement was so out of the blue. “Forget about the war,” she told him, stroking his sweat-slicked hair. “The war is over.”
 

But Reginald could only shake his head.
 

“It’s not over,” he said. “It hasn’t even begun.”

T
O
B
E
C
ONTINUED

REGINALD’S STORY CONCLUDES IN
FAT Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest
.
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