Clan Novel Giovanni: Book 10 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Justin Achilli

  The net result: Chas didn’t approve of his charge’s being left with the opportunity to jump ship if things got ugly with this whole “Kindred” situation, and Genevieve didn’t approve of having a knee-breaker present to punctuate her discussion with the other Kindred interest.

  They had begun bickering only moments after Isabel left them sitting at the table. Chas had muttered a comment about Pendleton being a poor choice of negotiators—she wasn’t Kindred and couldn’t really represent one effectively, especially if they tried to use any of their mystical powers. She maintained that she knew Kindred inside and out, and was more than able to handle herself among them. Chas countered with a personal attack, saying that if someone sent his secretary to talk business with him, both the secretary and the presumptive business partner would end up dead. Pendleton, not about to suffer snubs from a pistol-whipping thug, remarked that she was sure that was how all of the less-evolved Kindred handled their affairs.

  “We’ll see who’s less evolved when you piss off another Kindred and you need me to save your scrawny ass, Guinevere.”

  “Genevieve.”

  “Whatever. You’ll just end up as someone’s dinner sooner or later anyway. You think the Milliners are just going to let you grow old and trust you with the secret until you die?”

  “It’s in my contract,” Pendleton retorted, crossing her arms and straightening her posture, as if she could hide behind the document as a shield.

  Chas snorted. “Yeah, well, your contract’s a load of crap. The minute the Milliners see you as more of a liability than an asset, they won’t hesitate to shred that contract and you along with it. It’s not like you can go to the Supreme Court and claim that you work for vampires, and they’re being mean to you.” His voice trailed off. “Naive, prissy bitch.”

  Genevieve shook her head. “You think you’re better than me because you’re dead? Oh, that’s a good one. Well, I have news for you. You can’t just walk all over people because you’re some secret, scary vampire, you know.”

  “I can do it because it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

  That was a strange reply. Genevieve cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the code. The morals you mortals keep. They don’t matter. I’m Kindred, and all that inalienable-right bullshit you uphold doesn’t mean fuck-all to me. Look at me! I fucking drink blood to survive! I kill people so I can go on…living…or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be called.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Pendleton said. “It’s psychologically not possible. It’s not possible for vampire society to exist in a vacuum like that. That’s the reason why serial killers are finally caught, and why you never hear about them until something really heinous turns up. Degenerate behavior exhibits the law of diminishing returns—the more abhorrent acts you indulge in, the more it takes you to experience the thrill of indulging in an abhorrent act. You get jaded. By way of analogy, you’d have to kill to experience even the minor emotional response you once received from, say, shoplifting. And I don’t even want to think about what you do after killing becomes boring.”

  “No shit,” Chas shot back. “We’ve got an old riddle for it: A Beast I am lest a Beast I become. We’ve all got the devil inside us, and we have to let him out every once in a while or he’d completely take us over. It’s like fucking immunization or germ theory or something.”

  “That’s not possible. You can’t survive like that.” Pendleton crossed her legs, lit a cigarette.

  “Bullshit. Bullshit. After you’ve been through it all so many times, that anger—that Beast—is all you’ve got left, and if you fucking let it win, you’re fucking done. Done.”

  “So, it’s a pity-fuck you’re after?” Pendleton looked away, her eyes following the trail of smoke as she exhaled it.

  Chas’s eyes flashed red. He tasted the blood-bile rising inside him and his vision hazed with a flush of crimson. In a moment, he was on his feet, jerking Genevieve Pendleton up by the lapels of her designer jacket, lifting her so that her feet dangled above the ground, crushing the fabric of her jacket in his balled fists. Pendleton’s eyes bugged wide, almost out of their sockets. “You fucking cunt,” Chas roared, snarling lips and distended fangs barely able to form intelligible words. “Don’t you fucking ever accuse me of playing on that shit. I don’t need your fucking pity. I don’t need your goddamn concern or your fucking pissant sympathy. When you’re dead and gone and worm fucking food in a pine fucking box six feet under the ground, I’m still going to be here. Do you get it? You fucking understand? Does that make it through your fucking self-centered rational little mind? You don’t mean shit to me. The only thing that’s keeping me from pulling your fucking head off right now is the fact that Isabel’s already paid you to do your fucking job and I don’t want to deal with her. Does that make sense, you stupid bitch? Nothing you can say means the slightest thing to me. You’re just another fucking bag of blood to me.”

  With that, Chas reined himself in. He threw Genevieve back into her chair, which tumbled over backward, leaving her sprawled inelegantly on the floor.

  “Fuck. You see what I mean? I…You got a husband, Pendleton?”

  Genevieve couldn’t be sure what direction Chas was taking. “What?”

  “A husband? You married? Or maybe you have a ‘life partner’ or some shit like that?”

  “I’m, yes, married,” she gulped, picking herself up off the floor and straightening her jacket.

  “You love this guy?”

  “I do.”

  “He means everything to you, right? He’s ‘the one,’ as they say, no? The one person in the whole world who’s absolutely perfect for you, right?”

  “Yes. I suppose. I love him—I wouldn’t want to go on without him.”

  “That’s fucking right. Well, guess what, Pendleton? I’m going to tell you a story.

  “Right after I got turned—just about a hundred years ago, maybe a little more—I met ‘the one.’ Perfect girl. I fell in love with her just a few months after meeting her. You see where this is fucking heading? I’m a fucking vampire in love with a mortal woman. I can’t fucking tell her that I’m a fucking Kindred. So, I play it up—the whole Masquerade thing. I try to set up this relationship with this woman in spite of the fact that it can’t happen.

  “But the thing is—she knows. She doesn’t know that I’m fucking dead, but she knows that there’s…something. And it puts her off. But it’s not like I can tell her, you know? I can’t break the secret because that means sooner or later I’d have to kill her and I’m not ready to do that. At least, not yet.

  “So that’s where I’m fucked. I have the absolute perfect person in my… life, but I can’t have her. I can’t tell her, and any time I try to just ‘let it happen,’ she feels what’s wrong and it puts her off. And for all the fucking gifts that being Kindred provides—I can hit harder than anyone else, I can make people do what I tell them—I just can’t fix this situation. This woman I love, I can’t ever fucking have. I can’t make her love me, I can’t have her grow to love me and I can’t just be with her. It’s like being a thousand fucking miles away even when I’m right next to her.

  “And it makes me sick. Literally sick. I wake up each fucking night with a big, empty fucking hole in the middle of me that I can’t possibly fill. Ever. And the worse I feel, the more I think about her, which makes me even more goddamn miserable, which makes me think about her even more…. It never fucking ends.

  “And then she grows old, but I don’t; I stay eternally young. And she dies. Maybe she gets married; maybe she doesn’t, but it’s not important because it’s never fucking with me.

  “And then there’s another woman.

  “And another.

  “And so on and so on, every time opening the same old fucking scars that just can’t heal because you can never have what you need—that person— to fix it, to make it better. Never.

  “And sure, there are ways around it. You can turn the
one you love—make them a Kindred—but when you do that, you kill them. You can bring them somewhat under the shadow: feed them you blood, make them your ghoul, but that’s not an equitable relationship. You can force them to love you with the powers of the Blood, but that’s not real. In the end all you can do is watch them die and feel that fucking hole inside you grow bigger every time.

  “So, Genevieve fucking Pendleton, I can’t ever have what you have. I can’t have someone I love to come home to. I can’t touch a woman’s face and have her feel anything that’s not touched with the natural revulsion that she’s being fucking touched by something that kills. I can’t ever have anything except a fucking blackness inside me that grows greater every fucking night and wants me to destroy everything I come in contact with.

  “After a hundred fucking years of this shit, anger’s all you got left. It’s all you can use to keep that fucking Beast at bay—fighting fire with fire.

  “Think about that next time you kiss your husband goodnight or wake up with him in the morning. Think about the fact that having him, having someone who can truly love you for as long as your mortal life, is something that some people just can’t have. And for that, they’ll never be complete men, or complete people. And then think about the only thing that can take the place of love. We can hate in abundance, and we have no more suitable subject for our hate than ourselves. So, we rise each night because we don’t want to fucking hate ourselves any more than we already do. But we’re going to fail at even that.”

  Genevieve put out her cigarette. “I quit.”

  Sunday, 18 July 1999, 1:27 AM

  unmarked site

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Chas was right. The night she appeared before him to resign, Francis Milliner had Genevieve entombed in the concrete support of a parking garage his construction company was building.

  Saturday, 17 July 1999, 8:27 PM

  Delta Flight 2065, Logan International Airport

  Boston, Massachusetts

  All the shaking shook Isabel awake, even though she wouldn’t be able to rise for another forty-five minutes or so. Or rather, in another forty-five minutes she would be able to rise, if she weren’t packed like cargo into an airplane-safe coffin. When the best flights departed before dark, she had found no other suitable manner of travel—moving about in daylight was a ridiculous risk, and she was always groggy before the sun fell completely.

  Not that traveling cargo-class was any pleasant journey. Flying as a corpse was the only way it could be done. Airlines X-rayed the items that went into their planes’ cargo holds, looking for bombs and whatnot, and if a human-shaped thing turned up in anything but a registered transportable coffin, someone was bound to notice. Even if they did need to open the transit vessel, a vampire inside would have little trouble passing for dead—just sit still and let them poke at you. This always amused Isabel. No matter how grotesque it seemed, any time her cargo-method travel had been disturbed, at least one of the people opening the casket would always touch her. It probably would have unsettled anyone travelling with their dear departed to know that the corpse had been molested, but Isabel knew to keep quiet. It would have been more problematic if she rose and called the baggage handlers on it, but the image entertained her nonetheless—a burly, surly bag lifter fainting dead away as the corpse whose mouth he’d just put his finger in bit it off and spit it out at him.

  Such reverie was always the lightest part of the trip, however. For the entire flight, the cargo Kindred had to lie stock-still—she had no room to move. This wasn’t usually a problem during the day while the Kindred slept, but flights that ended after nightfall were a different matter; the traveler simply had to rest there. Some vampires who made a habit of “dead-winging” built custom caskets that afforded them a little room for comfort, but Isabel disdained this. It was only a matter of time before someone recognized a particular coffin and grew suspicious about the same dead body that had a habit of flying around the country.

  Invariably, the trouble of whatever demanded the trip bore down on the Kindred. Such was the case with Isabel’s trip to Atlanta. She knew before she ever arrived in Las Vegas that some problem had arisen with the border that separated the worlds of the living and the dead. At first, the elders of Clan Giovanni had thought that only the spirits of the dead had been involved. Even the rogue sorcerer Ambrogino Giovanni had been affected, retiring to his sanctum at the loggia for two weeks to recover from the ordeal.

  Then, members of the family had begun to go missing.

  Elders, ancillae, and neonates alike vanished, as well as a handful of their ghouls, immediate families, and entourages. Across the globe, the Giovanni had fought for years to extend their influence. Across the globe, they disappeared overnight.

  Then Ambrogino had called her. One of the Giovanni Kindred in the area had taken a brief trip, never to be seen again. That had been Frankie Gee, Francis Alberto Giovanni del’Agrigento—Chas’s boss. Isabel felt Chas should know that Frankie was gone, but not her suspicions why. In her opinion, he wouldn’t have understood, and it was too grave to worry the Milliners with.

  Ambrogino mentioned the old clan.

  Isabel was too young to know exactly who the “old clan” were, but she knew that the Giovanni hadn’t come by their current state honestly. Sometime in the murky past, the Giovanni had rebelled against the one who had made them vampires, destroying his brood and diablerizing him. Of course, many of the old clan escaped, never to be found. If Ambrogino was right, the problems in the lands of the dead had freed the members of the old clan who had fled there. No doubt they would be furious at their fate, and seek to exact some sort of revenge. Through his research, Ambrogino pursued that hunch, and it turned out to be true—the missing or dead Giovanni had all participated to some degree in the extirpation of their forebears, or their sires had. Don Pietro Giovanni’s two childer vanished from Prague; boorish Martino della Passaglia had watched his sire snatched away by something that hid in the shadows of the ceiling in his own haven. Ludo Giovanni, the Chronicler of Bremen, left only an unfinished sentence in his notebook as his last mark on the world.

  According to Ambrogino, the old clan had taken to calling itself the Harbingers of Skulls, and they would not rest until every member of the Giovanni had been culled.

  Well, they certainly had ambition. The Giovanni, while not the most numerous of the clans of Caine, were neither the fewest. Such a pogrom would take decades, if not centuries. But, as Ambrogino had noted, they had waited this long, and they had nothing but time on their side.

  In haste, the Giovanni elders had dispatched many able agents of the clan to learn what they could of the matter. From what information they gathered, these Kindred reasoned that the Harbingers of Skulls were few but very potent. Isabel had been among these early fact-finders, and knew the grim reality— the one she had been seeking was no doubt at least five millennia old.

  Of course, this crisis affected only the Giovanni— it didn’t stop the earth from spinning. Isabel had already been involved with two other important matters: monitoring the burgeoning Sabbat conquest of the American East Coast, and a prickly matter concerning the kidnapping of Benito Giovanni.

  Isabel’s connection to the East Coast affair was mostly a matter of consultation. She served as a liaison to members of the Sabbat and the Camarilla, intending to let both know that the Giovanni didn’t care for either one of them. Giovanni-dominated Boston would not be the next on the menu for the Sabbat, nor would it become a haven for Camarilla refugees. More than anything, she wanted to keep the Kindred ignorant of the true nature of Giovanni business in Boston—very few among the undead knew that the Milliner family maintained Giovanni influence there, and simply assumed that the only Giovanni were those named Giovanni. The ignorance of others was a very powerful weapon in the Giovanni arsenal, and the Milliners had retained Isabel to ensure that they didn’t lose it.

  Concerning Benito, Isabel had initially chalked up his disappearance to
the actions of the old clan. After researching Benito’s lineage, however, she found him only distantly related to and descended from anyone who had any relation to the purge of the Giovanni progenitors. Her contacts among the Kindred informed Isabel that Benito had fallen in with some dubious characters over a recent art deal. Thereafter, a bit of mundane detective work turned up details of Benito’s abduction that linked it to the Nosferatu.

  Right now, all three matters weighed heavily on Isabel Giovanni’s mind, and she found it difficult to sleep. Doubtless, one of these matters would have to fall by the wayside, and she saw poor Benito as having drawn the short straw. After all, he was only one Kindred—the other matters affected all of the Giovanni in one city, if not worldwide. Still, she suspected she hadn’t heard the last of Benito; she didn’t want to write him off, but something had to give, and his kidnapping had the greatest likelihood of righting itself if left alone.

  By the same token, the reappearance of the old clan took precedence, and Isabel planned to meet a contact in Atlanta who could provide her with information on a suspected member of that group. Apparently, the thing had made its haven in New Orleans, arranged somehow for Frankie Gee to come to it, and destroyed him. Frankie had been Kindred for about four centuries—he was one of the original Sicilian robber-barons who reinvented himself as the times dictated. That someone of such advanced age could be duped into walking into his own Final Death attested to the strength of whatever it was they were dealing with. Exactly how her elders expected her to succeed where other, older Kindred had failed was beyond her, but forewarned was forearmed. Meeting the creature on her own terms, if only to observe it and make a report back to other Giovanni, gave her an edge.

  Now all she had to do was maintain it.

  The plane shuddered to life, lurching onto the runway and climbing slowly into the sky.