That creature.
All Ramona could picture was the humongous eye, pulsating, oozing. Had it really sprayed some kind of acid in her face? She ran her finger along the partially healed skin—healed thanks to Zhavon’s blood—around her eyes and nose. Already the fight in the cave seemed like something from a horrible dream. It had faded to near obscurity, though the tiny acid burns on her shirt were real enough.
It was real for Jen and Darnell, Ramona thought.
And for Zhavon.
“Where’s Zhavon’s body?” Ramona asked suspiciously, as the last of the fog cleared from her mind, and the memories from last night grew more distinct. This was the spot where she had ended Zhavon’s life, but the body was nowhere to be seen.
“I buried it,” said Tanner.
“Where?” Ramona demanded. Her fingertips had formed into claws. She flexed them at her sides.
“I must go,” Tanner said, his consternation returning.
Ramona stepped toward him. “You’re not goin’ anywhere until I get some answers.”
She knew that she shouldn’t be so confrontational, that Tanner would be more likely to teach her what she needed to know to survive if she treated him respectfully, but his manner and his words drove her so quickly to aggravation without fail. Why, she wondered, should she treat him with respect if he wasn’t going to do the same to her?
“I’m not asking permission, whelp.”
Whelp. There was that name again. Ramona bristled at the sound of it. “We’re gonna have to have words about this ‘whelp’ business.”
Without warning, Tanner bared his fangs and let loose a demonic hiss. He snatched the glasses from his face and revealed blood-red eyes—the pupils were vertical slits like a cat’s—and their gaze bore right through Ramona. She stumbled back a step.
“I will brook your insolence no more,” he said through clenched teeth. “I buried the body by Table Rock, two miles that way.” He pointed off into the forest. “Wait there, and I will send others. We shouldn’t be so close to the cave.”
He turned on his heels but paused several yards away. “Show proper deference to your elders, or you will not survive.”
And with that he was gone. Ramona barely saw him move, but he was no longer there.
My God, she thought. His eyes…
She stood and stared at the spot where he had been standing, at the spot where those inhuman eyes had fixed their gaze on her.
Her legs were suddenly unsteady. She sat unceremoniously on the ground.
He’s as bad as that Toreador thing.
And Tanner, her sire, had made her in his image.
Friday, 23 July 1999, 10:10 PM
Upstate New York
Table Rock was easy to find—two miles north, where Tanner had pointed before he disappeared. Ramona was disturbed that he could slip away from her so easily. She hadn’t even been distracted; she’d been staring straight at him, and he was suddenly no longer there. Like when the biker had approached her that first night by the bridge: he’d been here… and then there. With no in between.
It was the type of thing that she could do to mortals.
But not at first, she realized.
Several months had passed after the change before she’d begun to understand and to control the remarkable abilities she’d gained, and months more before she’d been able to exercise those abilities with any consistency or competence, even around mortals.
Were these other vampires just more practiced than she was? Was it a matter of experience, or were they that much more powerful than her, like her compared to a mortal? Ramona couldn’t think of a good way to find out. So far, Tanner hadn’t proven very informative, and she doubted he would teach her something that might lessen his hold over her. He enjoyed his superiority too much to relinquish it. Ramona would have to learn what she could from him and read between the lines for the rest.
Maybe once they’d kicked this Toreador’s ass— whatever the hell a Toreador is—Tanner would open up a little more.
“At least he better stop callin’ me ‘whelp,’” Ramona said aloud to herself.
There was no secret to how Table Rock had gotten its name. It was a large slab of stone, maybe thirty by forty feet Ramona guessed, its roughly square surface amazingly level.
“Like a freakin’ table,” said Ramona to herself again, as she climbed onto the rock. “Some pioneer really stretched his imagination for this one.” The sound of her own voice eased her mind, if only slightly.
Ramona was less interested in the rock, and more in the human-sized patch of freshly turned earth on the mild incline nearby.
Zhavon.
Ramona suddenly felt as if the earth had opened beneath her feet. The stone no longer seemed stable. As she stepped down to the ground, her knees buckled. She staggered. The bitterness toward Tanner that she’d been nurturing was swept away, and only emptiness remained, a great void where before had been…what?
Saving Darnell, the Toreador, Tanner, the Sabbat, survival itself—all the things that should have occupied her mind were very small and far away, unimportant, meaningless.
All that mattered were loss and guilt.
Zhavon.
Ramona dropped to her knees atop the freshly turned earth that was her condemnation. She pressed her face in the dirt and remembered the time she’d carried the injured mortal through darkened streets and returned her to her home.
You saved her life, a voice within Ramona said. She was already living on borrowed time.
“I killed her,” sobbed Ramona, though as she wiped the dirt from her face she felt that it was dry. She should be crying. She wanted to cry. But there were no tears. She was dry and empty.
It was your right to take her, said the voice. You saved her.
“I killed her.”
You’ve killed before. You’ll kill again.
“Zhavon…” She choked on the name. There was no comfort in the words the voice spoke to her. There was no comfort in the world to soothe her. She could have left the girl after saving her. Ramona could have stayed away after that, denied herself.
She lay sprawled on the grave remembering her attempt to flee, remembering how Zhavon had followed her.
She wanted you! said the voice. She wanted you to take her blood.
But Ramona could hear the lie hidden in the words. A mortal couldn’t prevail against the hunger any more than Ramona could. She remembered the night of the change—how that figure, how Tanner, had taken her. She’d given in. She couldn’t help but give in. She had even thought for a few moments that she wanted to give in, but there was no real choice, no free will.
She wanted you to take her blood.
“No!” Ramona rejected the lies.
Zhavon had not chosen this, had not wanted this.
Ramona hadn’t chosen this.
Tanner had chosen. He had chosen for Ramona, and he had chosen for Zhavon.
Ramona dug her fingers into the dirt, clenched her claws into a fist.
“Fucking bastard.” She wanted Tanner to be back. She wanted to rip open his chest, to tear out his heart and stuff it down his throat. She would feast on his blood and watch that smug look freeze into a death mask.
There is strength in his blood. It is your due.
Ramona shook her head to clear her thoughts, to chase away the voice. She again touched her own dry face and wondered why she couldn’t cry. She searched for the sorrow that before had threatened to overwhelm her, but she couldn’t feel it. All she found were signs of its passing, like footprints of some extinct creature—footprints of her own extinct humanity. Compassion was giving way to bitterness, hope to hatred.
She patted smooth the gouges she’d made on the grave, then dragged herself back to the rock, climbed onto it, and collapsed. She lay there not willing to look at the grave, not willing to face the resting place of a person whose blood flowed through her veins.
Ramona would not face it, but the blood knew. It knew that, like the fl
ower plucked from the tree, humanity reaped would soon wither and die.
Ramona lay still and cold upon the flat stone. The crickets and tree frogs took no notice of her anguish.
Friday, 23 July 1999, 10:45 PM
Chantry of the Five Boroughs
New York City, New York
Johnston Foley tested the gem one final time. The flame, transferred from match to purple candle, sputtered for a moment, then caught. His thoughts were perfectly focused as he began the incantation and gradually moved the candle nearer the tiny, quartz sphere in the open chest.
The candle was not even within two feet when the flame was extinguished, snuffed as convincingly as if unseen fingers had smothered the wick between them.
Amazing, thought Johnston.
For the past week, the ambient power had grown stronger and stronger. Johnston had never before seen the candle extinguished at such a distance. It was a simple, unsophisticated ritual, but still he couldn’t help feel it was a portent of no slight significance. He would unravel the mysteries of the gem, and his superiors would undoubtedly take notice of his efficiency and skill. How could they not?
Aisling Sturbridge had returned from her council meeting in Baltimore. She told Johnston little of the goings-on there, but even she couldn’t conceal her interest in the gem. When he had shown her this same ritual two nights ago, he’d seen the nearly imperceptible rise of her eyebrow—that telltale gesture that with her, he imagined, would be the only sign of any emotion from murderous rage to sexual ecstasy.
She must be kicking herself for delegating the gem to me, Johnston thought. Surely my role in this will be made known to the Pontifex…maybe even to Meerlinda herself!
Johnston smoothed the wrinkles from his ceremonial robe and made an effort to clear such giddy thoughts from his mind. Jacqueline had gathered the necessary items—and had done a respectable job, Johnston had to admit. Aaron, a more consistently reliable apprentice, had performed the ceremonial cleansings and invoked the appropriate protective wards around Johnston’s chambers—both to prevent the unwary from interrupting the ritual, and more importantly as a precaution against anything that might be unleashed by the ritual. Johnston, ensconced within the confines of the wards, might in the larger view be expendable. The entire chantry was not.
Johnston took a step back from the stone and surveyed the paraphernalia on the work table: two eight-inch-tall, four-inch-wide, oval mirrors with polished silver rims, perfectly smooth glass and silver backing; five sticks of pine carved to the size of pencils and flawlessly sanded; a flat silver tray engraved with a fleur-de-lis matching the inlay on the wooden chest; seven candles of red wax melded with the entrails of a wild owl; several pieces of golden-edged parchment; an obsidian inkwell; and a particular set of ritual quills. The parchment, ink, and quills Johnston had attended to personally. The other items that Jacqueline had gathered, as well as Aaron’s work, Johnston had inspected as well and been satisfied.
Now it was time.
He closed his eyes and, with an ease born of decades of repetition, cleared all extraneous concerns from his mind. Each bit of mental flotsam he tucked in its appropriate niche, until his faculties were completely unencumbered, leaving him free to turn his mind’s eye inward to that place where mystical energies collected like a pool above an ever-bubbling spring. Down he dove, through the surface pool, deep into the aquifer itself, a repository to which few ever gained access.
Part of Johnston’s mind was vaguely aware that time was proceeding without him, that hours were passing beyond the limits of his body. His eyes opened, but the perversity of time, the discrepancy between a physical act and the arrival of light waves carrying to an eye the sight of that act, were grown inconstant. The surface portion of his mind that was attending to external reality received stimuli that were minutes rather than nanoseconds old.
Johnston saw when he had placed the two mirrors on either side of the wooden chest containing the gem. He saw the distant moments when his hands had arranged the seven candles equidistant from one another and the chest.
Suddenly time skipped ahead, as it was wont to do. Johnston must have placed the silver tray before the chest, for there it sat. His lips were moving, as if of their own accord. He chanted words of a language far older than most linguists would have believed possible, but the time-sense of his speech was different from that of his vision. Words that would sound in the next hour mingled with sights that were already minutes old. The Tremere was less the controller and more the medium for the ritual. From the aquifer of his soul, it received shape and form.
A ripple in the pool obscured the time-sense, shifted relationships. Johnston saw now the way in which his hands would grasp the pine sticks. His eyes recorded how he would snap each stick, and how not sap but blood would drain into the silver tray.
At the snap of the final stick, the seven candles flamed to life. The smoke shone red—an illusion projected by the now glowing quartz, which burned as brightly as any flame since those that had raged at the formation of the world. The odor reminded Johnston of the comfort of his mother’s womb—how many centuries had passed? Yet he was there, warm, comforted by the close swish-swish of her heart. He was become his embryo-self, connected to the greater being. From the amorphous stuff of his fledgling body, a hand took shape.
When the hand reached out, though, he felt surrounding him not the soft, forgiving flesh of his mother’s protecting womb, but hard, cold stone. He tried to pull back his hand, but the stone grew like living flesh to take hold of him. Even the cord that was his connection to life wrapped around him like a noose. All about, a tempest rose. Warmth and comfort fled.
Johnston tried to scream as he was dragged down into the darkness.
Saturday, 24 July 1999, 1:17 AM
Upstate New York
Ramona didn’t remember ever having fallen asleep since the night of the change—unless she counted her daily escape from the sun, but those hours seemed more like hibernation, or catatonia, than real sleep. She wasn’t sure that she’d fallen asleep this night—it hardly seemed likely—but suddenly she noticed that time had passed. The night was deeper. Just like a mortal could intuitively tell morning from afternoon from evening, Ramona was sensitive to the phases of night. It was not a hard thing to learn. Now she found herself later in the night, and somehow she had missed the intervening hours.
Sleep? She didn’t feel particularly rested. She hadn’t dreamed, but again that was something that hadn’t occurred since the change. She and Jen had talked about that not too long ago, just a couple of nights ago, although with all that had happened it seemed more like years ago. Jen was freed from her fears, and Ramona was left with no one to share her own.
Her chest ached, not from injury but from emptiness. Maybe it was the weight of her loss that had pressed her into slumber. For a few brief hours, she had been devoid of thought and memory and pain. But they were her constant companions now, and had not gone far.
What had called her back to her world of loss? For undoubtedly grief and bitterness had not yet run their course. Maybe it was the nearby scrabbling sound that was only slowly intruding upon her conscious mind.
Ramona sat bolt upright. She thought she saw the back of a man rooting around in the dirt of the fresh grave. At the sound of her movement, however, he whirled to face her. She was confronted by the rheumy eyes and bared yellowed fangs of a giant rat.
Ramona’s shock quickly gave way to instinct. Within a second, she was on her feet, crouched, ready to spring.
The rat-thing gave a half-hearted hiss. Loose grave dirt fell from its twitching nose. The creature seemed as likely to flee as attack, as it edged away, putting the grave between itself and Ramona, whatever protection the small mound of earth might afford.
“You are Tanner-childe,” said the rat.
Ramona stood speechless. Her shock, first at finding the creature so close to her and then seeing its face, was nothing compared to her surprise at hearing words come fro
m those inhuman lips. Her eyes narrowed as she regarded the creature more carefully.
Its body was bent but human, covered by filthy rags that smelled of garbage and worse. Its face, though distinctly ratlike—large bulbous eyeballs set close together, twitching whiskers, protruding and grotesquely misproportioned nose, receded jaw, tiny jagged teeth—retained a vaguely human shape.
“You are Tanner-childe,” the rat said again, in way of confirmation, since Ramona hadn’t responded. “He said you were a stubborn one.”
The rat chuckled at his own little joke, or maybe he wasn’t laughing and just had something stuck in his throat. Ramona was unsure about the disturbing, coughing sound he made.
Still keeping a wary eye on Ramona, the rat began rooting at the heaped earth again. “New grave,” he muttered.
Ramona leapt down from the rock and landed by the grave. She swiped at the rat and yelled: “Get away, you fuckin’ rat-faced son-of-a-bitch!”
The rat ducked under her claw and almost fell over himself scuttering backward out of her reach. He hissed like a cornered animal.
“Sometimes blood still in bodies,” he insisted. “Enough to share.” He stretched out his neck and watched closely to see if Ramona would accept his conciliatory offer.
“Ain’t nobody diggin’ up this body!” Ramona took another step toward him and raised a claw. He backed away farther.
“Your blood?” the rat asked, as if that were a claim he could understand.
Ramona looked down at the grave. What difference did it make now, she wondered, what happened to the body? Zhavon was dead. Gone forever. But, still, Ramona couldn’t stand the thought of this rat-thing digging up the poor girl’s remains and gnawing on them.
“My blood,” she said quietly. “Nobody’s diggin’ up this body.”
Clan Novel Gangrel: Book 3 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 13