Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  He led them deeper into the storm sewers, away from the upperworld. He followed the trail as easily now as if their prey had unrolled a ball of twine as he went and left it to lead them along. The Kindred hadn’t attempted any of the usual tricks to obscure his passing. He hadn’t waded through the shallower sections of the sewer if there was an alternate dry route. He hadn’t tried to disguise his scent with garbage or overflow from the waste sewers. It was as if he thought he’d be home free by this point. He’d counted on his gambit at the storm grate. But he hadn’t counted on Pug.

  Concentrate, Pug told himself. Whatever trick the Kindred had used at the grate had almost worked, and he could certainly try it again. Magic, Pug decided. To have given him that much trouble, the trick must have been magic. Concentrate.

  Just a few minutes later, Pug, with his nose almost to the ground, was concentrating so intently in fact that he didn’t notice the feet that stepped toward him from the darkness. He did notice, at the last second, the lead pipe that smashed down across his skull. Everything was very suddenly confused.

  He looked up just as the blow fell. The pipe struck above his right eye and along that cheek. The darkness of the tunnel was instantly replaced by bright flashes of light. Then Pug was weightless.

  Shouting. There was shouting in the distance, muffled, incoherent. He tasted blood—his own blood, or what passed as his own blood. But that taste was quickly diluted by another, rank liquid. He opened his eyes—tried to, wasn’t sure if he was successful. Darkness rushing.

  Hands grasped at him. Pug struggled to get away, to shield himself from more blows. But he was merely fumbling. They grabbed him, held tightly against his weak thrashing, pulled him roughly but met resistance. Water. They were pulling him through the water.

  Slowly, he was able to orient himself again. He’d fallen into the flow channel of the storm drain. That was clumsy, he thought vacantly. No, not a clumsy fall, he remembered. The pipe.

  A struggle was still going on, not far away, on the walkway where his three clanmates were now towing him. Pug caught a glimpse of Calebros’s wide face, all jagged fangs as he tore a savage bite from one assailant’s shoulder. The silent one, too, was a blur of violent motion, claws slicing and rending. The other Nosferatu attacked ferociously, giving no quarter. Bodies already littered the tunnel.

  Pug and his rescuers ducked as a projectile flew past—an arm, the hand still clutching a lead pipe. The arm landed in the foulness of the water, and the pipe pulled the limb under.

  The enemies were not faring well. That, Pug could discern as his senses cleared. The attackers, though immersed in battle, moved lethargically. Their pipes and scraps of wood rarely connected with a target, as the Nosferatu darted in and out among them, striking blow after blow. Pug had never seen Calebros move so quickly and was shocked too by the force of his attacks. The elder’s every blow was a scythe of destruction. Bodies were piling up.

  And then it was over as suddenly as it began, even before Mike and Paulie were able to hoist the still slightly dazed Pug back onto the walkway. Some of Pug’s clanmates were rifling through the pockets of the few bodies that remained relatively intact.

  “What were they doing here?” Pug, wringing out his clothes, asked no one in particular.

  “They were dead. Already dead,” said a quiet voice. Calebros. He sniffed at one of his own talons, stuck out a gray, pimpled tongue, and tasted a bit of the meat that wedged beneath. He nodded, confirming his assertion.

  Pug looked around at the bodies—body parts, mostly—scattered about. It was difficult reconstructing exactly how many assailants there had been. At least seven or eight, perhaps as many as a dozen? But despite the degree of dismemberment, there was little blood. “Kindred?” he asked.

  “No,” Calebros said. “Little more than corpses.”

  The other Nosferatu had finished ransacking the bodies and taken anything remotely of value: shoes, clothes, spare change, fillings. An ominous, throaty warble signaled the silent one’s impatience to continue. The creature’s deformed head, with its distended, vaguely avian chin, reminded Pug of a vulture. But Pug could also see—it was clear in the pale, icy eyes—that the silent one was not content merely to find carrion. He wished to create it.

  “You’d best lead us onward,” said Calebros.

  Pug nodded, turned back to recover the trail, and was relieved to have something other than the silent one to concentrate upon.

  Saturday, 13 November 1999, 4:46 AM

  The Shaft

  New York City, New York

  She could see how it got its name: ‘the Shaft’. The tunnel was roughly two car-lengths wide where it started, just below street-level Brooklyn. It was steep right off the bat, but almost immediately it turned sharply downward and continued from that point nearly vertically. There were ladders and ledges and carved steps and handholds all along the way—and more tunnels, hundreds of tunnels stretching out in every direction from the central shaft. Hilda had fallen in love with the place the minute she laid eyes on it. Pug had brought her here in their search for Jeremiah. That had been two nights ago. They’d come back last night, and still they had barely scratched the surface. A Kindred could spend lifetimes down here and never explore all the tunnels. If Jeremiah was lost near the Shaft, chances were he was going to stay lost.

  Pug had said as much last night, and Hilda couldn’t argue. But tonight, when the odd little fellow had been called away to help with the hunt, Hilda had sneaked away and come back. She couldn’t care less about the hunt or the Sabbat. Petrodon had been a bastard, and nobody in the Sabbat had ever treated her worse than folks in the Camarilla. So here she was.

  The last thing she had expected was to run into someone else.

  She’d been in the shaft for hours when she heard him, following along, coming from the same direction she’d just come. Coincidence? Down here with hundreds of tunnels and passages turning and twisting back on themselves? Hardly.

  She briefly considered hiding. Instead, picking up a large rock from the tunnel rubble, she bashed him in the head the instant he turned the corner. He was plenty big, and it must be true what they say about big fellows, because he fell plenty hard. She had considered the possibility that he was a friend, but he still had no business following her.

  He lay stunned for a moment. He wore an old suit, but he was obviously very hairy, mangy patches of brown and gray. He didn’t move, except for his large black eyes, no whites whatsoever, blinking rapidly. He had a nasal cavity instead of a nose, and the longest of his jagged teeth protruded through half of his lip. After a few minutes of quiet groaning, he managed to sit upright. “You would be Hilda?” he said somewhat groggily.

  “Guilty as charged, glamour boy.”

  He rubbed his head and gave her a lusty stare. “I like a girl who can help me get my rocks off.”

  “I’ll get your head off your shoulders if you don’t watch it. What are you doing here? Just in the neighborhood?”

  “Marston Colchester. Thanks for asking.”

  “I know who you are. Up with the Baltimore crowd. I seen you around the warren.”

  “And you still bash me in the head?”

  “I said I seen you. I didn’t say I liked you.”

  “Help me up?” Colchester asked. She offered a hand and pulled him to his feet. She noticed the way his clammy fingers lingered on her own. “I wasn’t following you, by the way. Jeremiah and I go way back. Pug said he might be around here somewhere. I just saw that somebody had come this way and thought I’d check it out.” Then he grabbed her ass. He grinned, waiting for a reaction—

  And seemed surprised when she latched on to his crotch. “Hmm,” she pondered. “Must be siesta time south of the border.”

  Colchester jumped back from her. “Well…ahem…about Jeremiah…”

  Hilda moved closer. “What’s wrong, sweetie? You wouldn’t get a girl all flustered and then run away, would you?”

  He started backpedaling. “Like I s
aid, he and I go way back.”

  “I had a Rambler once. The seats went back all the way.”

  “Uh…Pug said that he thought maybe—”

  She bashed him in the head with the rock again. He landed like a load of bricks, and she was on him in a second, tearing away the old suit. She rubbed herself up and down his abdomen and ripped away the buttons that had barely managed to hold her too-small blouse together. Her bountiful flesh fell in rolls across his face.

  “Dear God, I’ve died and gone to heaven,” he muttered beneath her.

  Hilda reached down between his legs and took firm hold of a surprisingly turgid appendage. “Siesta must be over, eh, flyboy?” But when she looked, she saw that the appendage did not belong to him. Instead, it was a fleshy tendril that had somehow entwined itself around his leg and up to his waist. “What in the—?”

  Suddenly the tendrils were everywhere, lashing the two Nosferatu like bloody, rubber hoses. Hilda jumped to her feet, but her own legs were quickly entangled, as were her arms, her neck. The tendrils pulled her back down. They pulled her along the tunnel floor toward the central chasm. Colchester was struggling, but she couldn’t see him. He was a mummy wrapped in flesh instead of cloth.

  Hilda pulled and kicked and bit, but to no avail. Finally all that was left to her was to scream. The sound, like Hilda herself, disappeared down the Shaft.

  Saturday, 13 November 1999, 5:50 AM

  Beneath Manhattan

  New York City, New York

  Although it was Pug who followed the scent, Calebros and company were close on his heels, leaning low as if they too could discern the trail. Mike Tundlight and Paulie and the others seemed to have, for the moment, forgotten their fear of Cock Robin. All kept close. Each time Pug picked up his pace, the entire pack of Kindred, nine in all, surged forward to keep up. They were driven by a thirst for vengeance.

  Calebros was pleased that they were so sure of him. Or perhaps it was the words of the Prophet in which the Nosferatu placed their confidence. The wizard does not burn, but seeks peace among the dead. One of several messages Anatole had left—prophecies as much as messages, for he had set the messengers in motion long before the events themselves came to pass. He had loaded the messengers down and then pointed them toward Calebros. And was it merely luck or happenstance that the warren chief had deciphered the messages tonight, when another night or two might have been too late? Calebros had never been a strong believer in coincidence, and after being caught in the wake of the Prophet was even less so. He believed that the discovery of the hidden messages had to have come so closely on the heels of the note from Sturbridge for a reason. She’d informed him that Nickolai was destroyed in a great conflagration, but the regent had provided no proof. And then the revealed prophecy: The wizard does not burn… Calebros found it easier to accept the cryptic ravings of a madman than the bland assurances of a Tremere.

  Even so, he had not been sure, not completely. Not when he alerted the justicar and gathered what clanmates had not been sent to Throgs Neck. Not even when Pug had found the scent beneath the burning hotel. Too many possibilities for error, too many potential avenues of failure.

  But when the corpses had attacked, then he was positive. Not Kindred, but walking corpses. Thaumaturgy. Blood magic.

  The others seemed to have sensed the final throes of his doubt. Cock Robin had pressed Pug more relentlessly, and the boy, to his credit, had forged ahead. They all had moved as quickly as possible behind their guide, who now brought them to a familiar place, a place Calebros was not completely surprised to see.

  Pug came to a halt, and all the hunting party with him. Ahead, the tunnel ended at a stout wooden door, and before the door stood a Nosferatu familiar to Calebros. The warren chief turned and signaled to Mike, who promptly took two of their number, Thurston and Diesel, and retreated back the way they had come.

  By the door, Abe Morgenstern scraped his toes in the muck and bowed placatingly. “Good morning to you all,” he said nervously, “and welcome to my abode.” His head was small, too much so, as if headhunters had gotten to him but not finished the job. Morgenstern was antitribu, but among the sewer dwellers that did not mean death on sight. Much could be learned by speaking to one’s enemies and, on occasion, trading information with them.

  But Calebros and his hunters were in no mood to trade anything tonight. “We will have him,” Calebros said, eschewing pretense and civility.

  Abe flustered easily. His entire head, little more than a skull with skin pulled very tightly over it, turned scarlet. “He’s not…I’m sure I don’t know what…”

  Cock Robin stepped past Calebros, and in the blink of an eye had laid open Abe from neck to groin with the single swipe of a razor claw. Surprise more than pain registered on Morgenstern’s red face as the justicar shoved him to the side. At the same time, Calebros noticed a strange sound in the background—like a chorus of fingernails tapping on stone, faint but not far away.

  There was no time to ponder, however. As Morgenstern fell to his knees and tried to stuff his withered intestines back into his belly, shouting and the sounds of struggle rose from behind the door. With one fierce blow of Cock Robin’s fist, the wood splintered, and the band of Nosferatu rushed forward.

  They crashed through the first room, barely a widening of the tunnel filled with boxes and garbage, and into the second. Thurston was on the floor, writhing and jerking spasmodically. Blood flowed from his nose and ears—and the blood boiled. Mike and Diesel were struggling with another Kindred, a middle-aged man. He was not as physically imposing as they, but there was sorcery in the air, as Thurston’s simmering blood attested.

  Nickolai, Calebros thought, the murderer I’ve sought for so long. “Yield, Tremere!” Calebros called. There were many questions he would ask, secrets he would pry loose. Mike and the others had circled around and blocked the warlock’s escape, but he was not yet subdued.

  The Kindred answered Calebros with a sneer and latched a hand onto Diesel’s chest. The Nosferatu reared back his head, mouth wide to scream in pain, but only a thick gurgling emerged. And then his blood. Boiling and foaming, it poured from his mouth and ran down his body. As he fell away, Mike still wrestled with their prey. As the other Nosferatu piled into the room, Nickolai grabbed Mike’s arm and an ethereal emerald light spread over it. Within seconds, the arm withered and shriveled. Mike screamed.

  With an alacrity that surprised even himself, Calebros clambered over the boxes and crates that filled the room to block the far exit himself. Mike, clutching his crippled arm to his body, staggered away from Nickolai. Cock Robin and the four Nosferatu behind him stepped forward threateningly.

  “Yield!” Calebros commanded again. He spoke quickly, before another blow could fall. “Your clansmen think you destroyed, as you wanted.” The wizard does not burn, but seeks peace among the dead. “They won’t be looking for you. I know you fled the hotel; you fled them.” Calebros had sought vengeance for so long, but now that the moment was at hand, he discovered he desired answers far more. How exactly had the murder played out? How had Benito and Leopold been drawn into the web?

  “Yield? So I can answer your petty questions, you wretched beast?” Nickolai sneered. He was pale and drawn. “I think not. The world is better off rid of your pathetic Petrodon, and it will be better off rid of you.” He reached a hand for Calebros, but the Nosferatu proved too quick, jerking out of the way.

  But that left the door unobstructed, and Nickolai lurched toward it. Calebros could not both stay out of the warlock’s deadly reach and prevent his escape, so he fell upon the Tremere. Pug and Paulie were there with him too, piling on. Nickolai roared with anger and slapped a hand at Calebros’s face. The warlock’s fingers found purchase against a deep-set eye and a gaping nostril—

  And nothing happened. Calebros waited a moment for his face to wither or his blood to boil away, but nothing happened. Nickolai screeched his rage and squeezed, as if he meant to crush the Nosferatu’s skull with his
bare hand, but no mystical surge of energies tore Calebros asunder.

  The wizard, his strength spent, crumpled to his knees beneath the blows that Pug and Paulie rained down upon him. “I yield,” he said, defeated, hardly trying to fend off the abuse heaped upon his shoulders.

  “Enough,” said Calebros, halting Pug and Paulie. “He has done his worst.”

  That was when Calebros heard the strange sound again—like fingernails drumming on stone, the fingernails of hundreds and thousands of fingers. As Calebros stood over the kneeling Tremere and Pug and Paulie backed away, the sound swelled, grew louder, almost deafening. Nickolai seemed confused by the noise as well, and the Nosferatu were craning their necks and looking about.

  All except Cock Robin. He stood squarely in the doorway that divided the two rooms of Abe Morgenstern’s pitiful haven. The justicar’s fists were planted firmly on his narrow, twisted hips, his gaze, full of hatred immeasurable, did not shift from Nickolai.

  He cares nothing for the answers we could find, Calebros realized looking at the justicar in that instant. Nothing for what we could learn of the Tremere and their sorcery. Cock Robin did not wish to exploit Nickolai; he wished him destroyed.

  The roaches began streaming into the small room by the hundreds and then by the thousands. They covered the floor and climbed over each other, and when they became too deep on the floor they scurried across the walls. Even the Nosferatu were unnerved by the onslaught. They stood rigidly still and looked anxiously at one another as the flood of insects reached their ankles, and then their knees. If any of them had spoken, his voice would have been drowned out by the clatter and chitter of millions of insects.

  Only Cock Robin remained unconcerned. Only he watched, unflinching, as the roaches began tearing away the undead flesh that was Nickolai. His screams were muffled by the rattle and buzz of the scavengers. But then he was beneath the flood, and at some point, his screams stopped.