Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  The attack on Pieterzoon was nor common knowledge among the Kindred. Ostensibly, morale might suffer knowing the enemy had struck so deeply into supposedly secure territory. More likely, Prince Garlotte of Baltimore was attempting to salvage his pride by keeping the attack quiet.

  Marston Colchester, of course, had kept Calebros informed—of the attack, as well as of the change in Pieterzoon’s mindset afterward. Until the attempt on his unlife, the Ventrue had been concentrating on shoring up the Camarilla defenses and consolidating his own power—there was Victoria Ash to contend with, now assuming the role of refugee ingenue; there was also Garlotte, his second-in-command Gainesmil, Marcus Vitel, and a smattering of others. After the assassination attempt, Pieterzoon turned his attention to the darker side of warfare. He had discussed with Colchester the possibility of hiring assassins of his own. At Calebros’s suggestion, Colchester had made a recommendation—a killer who would strike fear throughout the ranks of the Sabbat because, by rights, she should have been one of their own. Only time would tell if Pieterzoon would follow Calebros’s unseen lead.

  Time. If only there were enough time. For the second instance that night, Calebros felt keenly the passage, the scarcity, of time. Relentless, irreversible. The sensation was strange. For countless years the clocks had seemed to tick so deliberately, so slowly. He had once spent eight months tracking the growth of iridescent algae on an underground pool—not by noting the new growth each week or even each night, but by watching intently, without interruption, hour after hour, night after night, for eight months.

  The kine measured time by hours, by days and nights. What was a single night to the Kindred? A fraction of a second of eternity? Of what significance was the passing of a month, a year, a decade? A grain of sand, not within an hourglass, but upon an endless shore.

  Somehow, that was changing. Calebros didn’t know how, or why, but he could feel it. He could feel it in his blood. He could read it in the reports.

  The desk lamp began flickering again and distracted him from his thoughts. His attention returned to the papers on his desk, to the problem of Hesha Ruhadze, to the lethal dance taking place within the Kindred halls of power in Baltimore. There was, as well, the wildcard that was the Prophet of Gehenna. As far as any of Calebros’s people knew, Anatole was still somewhere within the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. To what dark purpose, only God knew.

  Still, the routine of it all, of enumerating the various dots and then attempting to connect them, restored Calebros’s sense of order amidst the swirling chaos. It restored his illusion of control.

  Thursday, 22 July 1999, 10:18 PM

  Governor’s Suite, Lord Baltimore Inn

  Baltimore, Maryland

  The suite was very much as Victoria had left it when she had stormed out three nights prior. She had packed away most of her belongings, the gowns and accessories, but not all. The Toreador had left in a huff, angry with her benefactor, Prince Garlotte, who had provided the lodgings as well as many of her other possessions. When she’d arrived in Baltimore with only the proverbial clothes on her back after the fall of Atlanta, Garlotte had taken her in, treated her well. She was his trophy Toreador. He would have given her anything she’d asked—anything except the favor she did ask, to banish Jan Pieterzoon from the city. Garlotte had refused to exile his fellow Ventrue. So she had left.

  Now, Garlotte sat on a couch amidst the detritus of her pique, looking like little more than a cast-aside gift himself. Clothes that hadn’t made it into a box or hanging bag were scattered about on tables, over chairs, hanging from the backs of doors. Marston Colchester, as he slipped quietly through the unlocked door, wondered if the prince had moved at all in the intervening nights or days since the Nosferatu had left him. Garlotte wore the same outdated suit and the same wistful expression; he sat in the same spot on the couch.

  “My Prince,” Colchester said. He curtsied awkwardly, knowing full well the mockery his lumbering, mangy-furred frame made of the gesture.

  Garlotte acknowledged his spy’s presence with a lackluster wave and sighed. Colchester was struck by the prince’s uncharacteristic lethargy. The man was usually brimming, overflowing with energy. The prince, as often as not when he got an idea into his head, was instantly ready to ride off in five different directions all at once. He was a fair, if strict, prince, and one on whom subtlety was often lost.

  No, Colchester reconsidered, that was not completely true. The prince was not blind to subtlety; he simply refused to abide it. As Colchester saw it, Garlotte was a five-color-crayon man, not the sixty-four-color-with-the-sharpener-in-the-back-of-the-box type. And that was by choice.

  “What’s she been up to?” Garlotte asked wearily, as if he didn’t really want to know but felt he should ask.

  “Ms. Ash?” Colchester asked knowingly. Garlotte glowered up at him from beneath his dark brow. “Ahem, yes…well, mostly she’s been getting settled in at Gainesmil’s.”

  From earlier conversations, Colchester knew he should leave it at that…but he just couldn’t help himself in the face of the so obviously forlorn prince. “None of the old bump and grind as of yet,” he said, adding a series of rather enthusiastic pelvic thrusts by way of illustration, “but it’s early still. You know, I wouldn’t have pegged Robert for a ladies’ man, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him tickle her tonsils with the old one-eyed—”

  “That is quite enough,” Garlotte snarled. His face was noticeably reddened, dark with barely contained rage.

  “Ahem. Yes, well, ah…she did meet with Vitel tonight.”

  Garlotte’s eyes narrowed. “Yes?”

  “Are you sure you want to know? I mean, I’m just the messenger—”

  “What happened?” Garlotte drew in a deep breath and puffed up his chest.

  “Well…” Colchester paused significantly and let the moment draw out, then, “Nothing much, really.”

  “Do not toy with me, Marston. I’ll have your sorry head on a pike.”

  Colchester gulped. Threat of Final Death. Maybe it was time to play things straight. He knelt and bowed his head. “Forgive me, my Prince.” He peeked up; Garlotte wasn’t looking at him. “I’m perhaps not the most sensitive in dealing with matters of the heart.”

  “There is no ‘matter of the heart’ here!”

  Colchester cocked his head to one side. “Uh-huh. I see.”

  “Stand up, you oaf. What transpired between Victoria and Marcus Vitel?”

  Colchester climbed to his feet. “Oh, she made some innuendoes about how the two of them could rule the city. He politely ignored her.” And he didn’t look at her the whole time, Colchester thought. How the hell did he manage that?

  “Ignored her, did he?” Garlotte asked, somewhat relieved.

  “Oh yeah,” Colchester reassured him, then added, “I was waiting for her to flash some titty. That would’ve got his attention. Yeah, baby!” He groped the air with his hairy fingers.

  Garlotte was on his feet in a flash, his face awash with anger. Just as quickly, Colchester was three steps closer to the door.

  “Do I offend? Forgive me my barbarous ways, my prince,” Colchester said quickly and contritely. “These matters of the heart—I mean, of state…matters of state—”

  “Not one more word. Not one!”

  Colchester nodded emphatically. He waited, and as the silence lingered, Garlotte sat back down. He took a deep calming breath. “So, she did not attempt to…entice Vitel in the same manner as Pieterzoon?”

  Colchester shook his head.

  “And Vitel was not receptive to her entreaties?”

  Colchester nodded affirmatively this time.

  “Very well,” Garlotte said. “Continue observing her.”

  Colchester nodded again. How convenient that his two clients, Garlotte and Pieterzoon, both seemed so interested in each other and in Victoria. It made Colchester’s job easier. Even so, and despite his banter, he wasn’t completely comfortable with keeping tabs on Ash. He could ha
ve one of his underlings take on the task, but, Colchester also knew, he would not. He would do it himself. Ah, the sacrifices he was willing to make for the clan.

  Keeping an eye on Garlotte, the Nosferatu backed out of the suite. With the door safely closed, he sent a few more pelvic thrusts in the prince’s general direction, then lumbered away down the hall.

  Friday, 23 July 1999, 1:29 AM

  A subterranean grotto

  New York City, New York

  “They would have eaten me, I tell you!”

  “I believe you, Jeremiah,” Calebros said in a forced, calm tone. He was tired of nodding politely, of reassuring his clanmate. Jeremiah could be a difficult person to like at times. This was rapidly becoming one of those times.

  “Don’t you humor me!” Jeremiah snapped. “I’ve been coming to you about this for weeks now.”

  Seems more like years, Calebros thought.

  “And still you’ve done nothing. Nothing!” Jeremiah paced around, gesticulating wildly.

  There was no second chair by Calebros’s desk, and for this very reason. He mostly didn’t like guests, didn’t want guests, didn’t want to encourage them to sit down, to take a load off and stay for a while. Most anyone who had reason or inclination to visit Calebros was irate, complaining, or tiresome. Jeremiah happened to be all three presently.

  “That is not true,” Calebros assured him.

  Jeremiah snorted in disgusted. “What, then? Tell me. What have you done?”

  “I have considered quite carefully your report.

  “Ha! Like I said, nothing. ‘Considered my report…’” Jeremiah repeated contemptuously. “This is what I think of you and your reports—” he said, grabbing a handful of papers from the nearest stack on Calebros’s desk. Jeremiah made to fling them into the air—

  Instantly, Calebros’s hand shot out and latched around his visitor’s wrist. Talons pricked undead flesh ever so slightly.

  “Believe me,” said Calebros evenly. “You do not want to do that.”

  They faced each other for a moment, one monstrous creature restraining the hand of another.

  Jeremiah’s fingers, biting into the papers, were long and grotesquely thin, little more than needles of bone. His entire body was thin and hard and covered with knots, bulging masses of hardened tissue, like an old, gnarled swamp tree. Finally he stopped resisting Calebros and returned the reports to the desk.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeremiah said and resumed his pacing, just as intently if less frenetically.

  “Think nothing of it,” Calebros said. In truth, however, his attention was fully occupied by the sheets of paper Jeremiah had just set back down. Like all the reports, they were an odd lot, a jumbled collection of sizes, some handwritten, many typed, with addenda of scrawled red marginalia. Some of the reports were recorded on portions of grocery bags or thin cardboard, yet Calebros took each piece that had been disturbed and smoothed it down, gently, like a mother pressing the wrinkles from an unruly child’s clothes.

  Not until he’d attended to each report did he look back to his impulsive visitor. Jeremiah did not notice the cold glare leveled at him, nor did he seem to have been aware of Calebros’s preoccupation.

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” Jeremiah was saying, as much to himself as to Calebros. “Should never have happened. They were rats. Just rats. They should have responded to me. Just rats. But there was something else there too…something…emboldening them, joining them…”

  “Joining them? Not physically.”

  “No, of course not. But their instincts, their anger… I reached out to the mind of a single rat, but I touched all of them.” Jeremiah’s pacing had fallen into the pattern of a triangle. Each time he reached the point nearest the desk, he changed direction, but he continued tracing the same lines over and over again. His eyes, almost hidden by a thick, drooping brow, seemed to glaze over as he gave himself to memory.

  Calebros watched, waited. His accustomed role.

  “It didn’t feel like there was a conscious mind directing them,” Jeremiah said. “Not giving orders, but there was something…anger…or maybe pure hatred.”

  He’s been feeding from drug-addled kine again, Calebros thought.

  “Let me take the Prophet,” Jeremiah blurted out suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Anatole, the Prophet of Gehenna.”

  “I know damn well who you’re speaking of, but why on earth—”

  “I’ve done it before. I’ve led him around,” Jeremiah said. He was pacing more quickly again, the words spilling from his mouth. “He hears so many voices, one more added to the mix is nothing unusual. He would know what I’m talking about. He’d be able to tell. I could take him down there. He’d know what it is.” Jeremiah stopped at the edge of the desk and leaned forward on both of his bone-thin arms. His voice was no longer manic, but instead low and dire: “There is something dark down there, Calebros. We must find out what.”

  Calebros was taken aback by the sudden demand. He was accustomed to receiving reports from his people, mulling over the information, pondering implications, connections, ramifications of action. Every action, Calebros knew only too well, produced unforeseen consequences. Jeremiah did not seem to recognize that fact, else he would not be making such incredible pronouncements. And that after disrupting my files! Calebros thought.

  “You saw nothing to justify such drastic measures,” he said.

  “Nothing?” Jeremiah’s eyes bugged wide. “Haven’t you been listening? Have you not heard a word I’ve said? I saw nothing?”

  “I don’t doubt what you saw,” Calebros said calmly, “but neither have I reached the same conclusions that you seem to have reached. I do not say that you are wrong, no matter how fanciful your notions—”

  “Fanciful!”

  “But Anatole is not a toy or a pet, to lead around and play with as you please. You might well be able to guide him,” Calebros said, hands raised to pre-empt his guest’s protestations, “but the Prophet…” Calebros paused. He was not practiced in face-to-face debate, and words did not come quickly to his lips to describe his apprehension of Anatole. It was not the visceral fear that sapped his strength at the mention of the Assamites; it was more a deep, unsettled feeling. Was he more disturbed, Calebros wondered, by Anatole, or by what the Prophet might discover?

  “The Prophet is here in the city,” Jeremiah said. “We must use all the tools that are available to us.

  “We think he is still in the city,” Calebros tersely corrected him. “He entered the Cathedral of St. John the Divine a month ago. None of our people have been able to enter since, and our kine sources who’ve gone in have found no trace of him. So as to your one point, he’s not exactly available to us, and secondly—”

  “Calebros! Calebros!” The calls from outside the office cut through the quiet of the warren like a sudden clap of thunder. Cass Washington burst into the chamber, her skirt and loose sweatshirts billowing from her haste. “Calebros!” She didn’t pause or apologize for the interruption. “Calebros, Donatello is in! He’s gotten into the cathedral!”

  Calebros, flabbergasted, looked back and forth between Cassandra and Jeremiah. She was excited and anxiously awaiting instruction. Jeremiah had crossed his bony arms and was looking quite pleased with himself.

  “Well, calm down, girl,” Calebros told Cass. “We’ve still to see what comes of it.” Then he turned to Jeremiah. “And you, don’t get smug with me. No matter what happens, you’re to stay away from that cathedral. I’ll not have you interfere just because of some…some old wives’ tale.”

  Jeremiah protested, “I didn’t say anything about—"

  “You didn’t have to,” Calebros snapped. “You didn’t have to.” Calebros wasn’t about to go chasing rumors and superstitions. Nictuku. Not even if those superstitions were the worst fear of his entire clan. Especially not in that case.

  Friday, 26 July 1999, 12:47 AM

  Amsterdam Avenue, Upper West Side, Manhatt
an

  New York City, New York

  Seemingly counting each step and placing each foot with care, the man walked nervously down the street. His lips quivered as they mimed his interior monologue. How far did he travel in a minute? How many steps did he take in a hour? It seemed he’d walked for miles in the passing of but a second.

  He wondered, could it have been an hour already? The man did not wear a watch. In fact, he wore no jewelry or decoration at all—nothing but the angel that followed him more closely than a shadow—and somehow, suddenly, that disturbed him. He clutched at his neck, fingers seeking a chain or cord. The fingers prodded and stabbed at the top of his concave chest, where they slid back and forth in the cavity like a skateboarder out of control.

  The man knew that his name was Donatello, but was somehow unable to make himself believe it. For all his careful and patient strides, he too was out of control. And despite his sagacious tread he was aimless.

  No matter how he strove to make progress, he felt as though he traveled in nothing but circles. Every time he saw his reflection in the dirty windows of the brownstones that lined the street, Donatello felt it was the first time. He knew that hunchbacked, sinister, loose-fleshed outline was his own, but he knew it only in the vague way that allowed him to guess but not speak his name. It was like searching for the Holy Ghost in a coven of witches—surely present, but at bay.

  So he kept walking, hopeful that as his feet made progress, his mind would as well. He grasped that he’d emerged from an experience of an extreme nature. It had been a gamble, that much he knew as well. But one that had paid off or not? Had he desired to forget himself? What manner of monstrous past might that horrid image in the mud-streaked window wish to hide from itself?