by D C Young
There was a type available for every vampire and the old school Chinese man made selection rather easy. The donors, or hosts and hostesses as Mr. Tan preferred to refer to them, were cataloged according to race, coloring, nationality, even blood type so making a choice was always easy but at the same time strangely tantalizing.
The Chinese were good at that… tantalizing their customers. Veronica had noticed that custom intertwined in almost all her dealings with Tan and his associates the world over. His establishment, and style of business, was only rivaled in her mind by his Japanese counterparts. In Miyako, Veronica had discovered several establishments which seemed like usual traditional tea houses out front but in the enormous, light tight back rooms were elaborate feasting dens where beautiful, well dressed geisha in full regalia offered their wrists to feed their paying vampire customers.
Veronica had been feeling particularly nostalgic recently. Her love affair with the enormous, hot blooded Viking werewolf Bjorn was new, and as hot as ever; truth be told they were infatuated with each other. Bjorn wasn’t like the men that Veronica was used to meeting. He was ancient and well traveled There were people, things and places he had seen and learned about that only a being his age or older would have. Veronica craved that kind of knowledge and Bjorn indulged her with story after story.
It was also true that their attraction was fueled by their individual personalities. Veronica was a loner who was used to depending on herself and was loath to be around anyone who felt the need to take care of her… like Rand.
I mean, come on? Veronica scoffed to herself as she sat scribbling in the dark corner. For someone so insistent on his desire to do so, how the hell did he think he could take care of me? By getting out of my way when the shit hit the fan? Lame!
Veronica and Rand had been furiously involved until about two weeks before she’d met Bjorn but things had begun to fizzle and there was nothing Veronica hated more than a hanger on. There was also a conflict in their definitions of gender roles. Rand felt the constant need to protect Veronica.
How and from what, she thought to herself. Now that’s something I really want to know.
Rand was from a generation that was taught by their parents that the man protects and provides and then simulated into a society which told them women were equal to them but still needed and wanted their chivalry.
What completely contrary bullshit!
Bjorn on the other hand, didn’t. He was raised in a time and place where the women, called shield maidens, went into the meanest of battles side by side with their husbands and sons. They trained with the soldiers and fought just as viciously. Bjorn recognized Veronica’s fighting prowess and her skill. He continuously encouraged her to develop and enhance them in order to be her own best protector. That was something she could stomach to be around.
Veronica leaned back into the plush seat and closed her eyes. She rested her head back against the pillowy headrest and tried to clear her mind of the angry thoughts she was having of Rand and the increasing stirring in her loins for Bjorn Ironside. Instead, she pictured the night she had waited in a deserted cemetery in to ambush the fledglings of a rogue vampire by the name of Fariha de Sanabria. It had been a good fight; honorable, clean and purposeful. The night itself had been a perfect one and Veronica wanted to remember every detail so she could include it in her latest novel.
The breeze moving through Whittier had been cool and moist that night; it had felt fresh on her face and had brought with it the enchanting scents of orange blossoms from the groves in Leona Valley to the North and even stronger was the Californian Buckwheat wafting down from the foothills north of Pasadena. Both were scents which she loved and Veronica never took for granted the fact that the only reason she could smell them constantly in the Los Angeles air was because she was a vampire.
Hey! At least all the extra-sensory bullshit could come in handy from time to time. Am I right?
She sat perched atop the steeple of a mission-style building staking out the grounds below her, and she remembered having a calming feeling of purposefulness sweep over her.
Everything surrounding her had somehow come together and formed the perfect requiem to the reason she’d had to pay a visit to that cemetery in Whittier that night. As she lay back in the booth under the Underground Railroad record shop remembering the events of that night, she realized a coincidence between that evening in the past and the one in her present.
Before heading to Whittier cemetery, there had been no way for Veronica to know how long she would have been out there waiting for her quarry in the night air and the darkness, so she had been sure to feed early and well on a fresh supply of hemoglobin.
She’d acquired the blood from a local supplier a few days before; a good, reliable source. The same conscientious old Chinese vampire from San Francisco who ran the blood den she was sitting in. Even now her habit of patronizing Mr. Tan remained; once a week Veronica took a quick trip to one of his establishments to collect her supplies and indulge in a little of the secretive ‘Chinese Tong’ atmosphere that existed in Mr. Tan’s many opium rooms.
Veronica had come to fall in love with the sinister underbelly of Southern California’s trendy sub-culture; the drug scene, the music scene, the gothic supernatural scene that didn’t seem to exist anywhere else in that magnitude except in New Orleans, of course. It was strange but she somehow felt at home there entwined with strangers on the low settees in the darkened basements. Everyone did their own thing and as the country song says, they ‘minded their own biscuits’. Some had sex, others got high; some fed while others were fed upon.
It was non-committal and symbiotic and the pretext of that drew Veronica in repeatedly. But her time with Mr. Tan had drawn to an early close that week and she was waiting for her prey in the cemetery, ready to attend to her latest hunt.
A few weeks prior an elder vampire by the name of Fariha de Sanabria had been sent to the ‘Final Death’ by an unknown killer. The rumors on the street had it that a human had done it; Veronica now knew that it had been the work of Rand. When she had first put two and two together on that she had been infuriated. At the time, it had been common knowledge among the California vampires that there was a renegade killer operating in the area who tracked down vampires, broke into their homes and went after them trying to gun them down with a crossbow that shot silver tipped arrows.
Everyone had been fearful of him; apparently he was pretty damned good with that bow. As things had gone for Fariha, she had been caught in the open and ended up impaled to a tree by an arrow straight through the heart. Her ashes had been swept up by a park maintenance worker in Yorba Linda the next morning.
But Fariha’s demise wasn’t what had taken Veronica to Whittier that night; at least not exactly, but still the death of the three-hundred-year-old Moor had been a big relief to Veronica. Fariha had been a very skilled fighter and proficient killer; Veronica had not been looking forward to the day when she would have to take her down. It would have been inevitable of course, because Fariha was a nest builder and that stuff never went down well with modern day vampires.
Fariha de Sanabria kidnapped people, fed on them until they were too close to death to know better than accept her offer of immortality. From that moment on, they would find themselves living the life she would give them. An astounding six progeny had been created in her nest during the last year and it was of grave concern to most of the elder vampires in the area. Apparently, Fariha wasn’t doing a very good job of teaching her children how to behave, neither was she concerned with keeping them in check. To those who knew the signs to look for, Fariha and her fledglings were emerging as a big threat and certain bugs had been put in the right ears about it. So, Rand had found her and killed her; now Veronica was about to do the same to Fariha’s children.
Just a few minutes after midnight, six dark figures sauntered out of a decrepit, old mausoleum that Veronica had her eyes trained on. The information she’d gotten had been extremely good. They
gathered, almost invisible, in the darkness and shadows beneath two weeping oak trees. There was a strong scent of death emanating from them and Veronica had cocked her head to one side as she counted the figures and made sure they were all present; six baby vampires.
They stood there; weak, vicious, angry and starving. It was their time for hunting and they steadily getting into a frenzy. They had gained a bit of a reputation of having no moral standard and no self control. Recent reports had said that for that group no one had been off limits lately; children, passersby, joggers… It seemed that Fariha’s death and the pain of her loss had driven them into a new kind of depravity. They killed without discrimination, but not without consequence, of course.
Veronica would be sure to wipe them out.
She remembered the fight as if she had watched it on a screen in slow motion and she opened her eyes quickly, grabbing up the pencil and notebook to write it down exactly as it had happened:
“Veronica had stayed as still as a statue and watched waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. One of the male vampires had paused on his way toward the cemetery gates, sniffing at the air around him as if he had caught the scent of something strange. It was only a few minutes longer before he and the other five realized that their senses were correct but that was all the time it took for it to be too late for all of them to survive Veronica Melbourne.
“The Huntress swiftly jumped from the high steeple landing soundlessly on the ground behind them. She positioned herself at the ready, planning to move through the small group of young vampires and dispatch them in a perfect arc.
She measured them up and took her stance, then drew her silver bladed Katana and a mahogany silver tipped stake which she typically used to kill rogue vampires. In microseconds, she had moved through the group, removing their heads clean from their shoulders and driving the wooden spike straight through each and every vampire’s heart.
“She moved around one more time to flash the blood from her weapons and as the tails of her coat came to settle around her calves, Veronica looked up and watched the six headless figures burst into flames among the headstones of the Rose Hills Memorial Park. She smiled as she left the cemetery, sheathing her weapons at her side.”
Wow, now that has the makings of a fucking good book, she thought. I wonder what Spinoza will think of this one.
As soon as the narcissistic thought had gone through her mind, Veronica heard another voice talking to her. It sounded like someone whispering in her ear, but of course no one was there to do that. She shook her head confused until she finally recognized the voice.
It was that witch friend of Sam Moon’s, Allison Lopez and Veronica couldn’t believe what she was hearing. As soon as Allison was finished mumbling in her ear, Veronica snapped the notebook shut, shoved it and her pencil into her backpack and left the table.
When she was outside, she pulled down the pair of steam punk style goggles she was wearing on her head over her eyes and took off running. Veronica couldn’t fly but she sure as hell could run; truth be told, it was almost teleporting the only difference being that she actually physically moved through the space between the locations to get where she was going. She called it ‘whooshing’. All she had to do was envision the place she wanted to be and ‘whoosh’ she could be there in anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the distance. She could ‘whoosh’ to the Laundromat down the street or to St. Petersburg, Russia. But right at that moment, her destination was the Hollywood Hills; more precisely, Elysium House.
Chapter Six
An hour later, there was a loud whoosh sound and a violent flutter of the curtains before Veronica Melbourne stepped into the room through the open balcony doors. She looked around and saw the two Asian vampires huddled closely, as usual, over a game board. Saigo claimed that playing chess helped to keep his mind sharp. Veronica could see how that would be the case; he was a warrior and chess was a great game for learning and executing different strategies against your opponent.
One the other hand, she couldn’t understand why the game appealed so much to Tzu-Hsi. The woman obviously never played it during her human years living in China, neither was she a warrior or any form of great intellectual it would seem. So Veronica had chalked it up to the Empress Dowager just enjoying the samurai’s company over the company of any of her other housemates.
“There she is!” Saigo said suddenly, breaking Veronica’s chain o thought. “See, Tzu-Hsi. I told you the witchy girl would get through to her somehow.”
The Empress did nothing but grunt softly and move her next piece. After a few moments, she raised her head and turned to look at Veronica. With a dismissive wave of her hand, she said, “I was never worried about the witch’s capabilities of hollering over the psychic lines to get this one here. I’m not even worried that this huntress will locate Samantha Moon. What worries me, Saigo is whether any of them even have an inkling as to who and what they are now up against.”
“What is it, Tzu-Hsi? I haven’t seen you this upset since the US re-opened trade with China in 1972!” he said and laughed heartily at his joke.
The Empress Dowager shot Saigo a nasty look and the samurai shut up and stopped his laughing immediately.
“It’s Himiko… well, in actuality, it’s her followers that we should be wary of for the moment. If they raise the witch queen it could mean the end of the world as we have come to know it, and be bored with. It will definitely be the end of all us supernaturals… in fact; we will be the first to perish in Himiko’s wake.”
“What the hell is the crazy old woman talking about?” Veronica asked Saigo.
He shrugged his shoulders and returned his gaze to Tzu-Hsi.
“You heard the girl! Explain yourself, woman,” Saigo commanded. He had sat straight up in his chair and away from the edge of the game table. His legs were spread wide apart and his fists were resting on his thighs next to the hilts of his swords. It was the sitting stance of a samurai who was ready for action.
“I do not need to do any such thing, Saigo!” Tzu-Hsi shot back at him. “Julia must speak with them first. The top priority is to remove Samantha Moon from the clutches of the witches who have captured her, and then we will take steps to ensure that they do not proceed with their nefarious plans to raise Himiko from the dead.”
As if on cue, Julia Agrippina entered the room. She didn’t approach the Empress Dowager and the samurai; instead she issued instructions to the young vampire.
“Come with me, Veronica. Allison has been waiting for you.”
***
They entered the elaborate library where Veronica and Julia had had their first real conversation over a year before. Allison was reclined on the chaise near the western wall, a piece of furniture that brought bad sad memories of her friends Anastasia and Alexei Romanov. It had been the exact same place where she and Sam had questioned Ana and reached into her mind to get details about where he was being held captive by a crazy German scientist. Allison was similarly laid out on the couch now.
A shiver ran down Veronica’s spine.
“Is she channeling Sam now?” Veronica asked Julia.
“No, she’s channeling the witches who took her.”
Veronica turned to look Julia straight in the eye. The confusion was compelling and she never liked feeling as if she was the last person to a party. What Tzu-Hsi had said before had been confusing enough but now, instead of clarification, all Julia was doing was proliferating Veronica’s bewilderment.
“Come over here and take a seat, Veronica. I’ve got a lot to fill you in on and as usual with any story that involves an Elder, the best place to start is always at the beginning.
Oh, boy! Here we go again.
Chapter Seven
1851.
The Forbidden City, Beijing, China.
“You’ll be lucky to keep from falling flat on your face when you’re introduced,” Yehenara sneered. The smile on her face was anything but encouraging. She watched the express
ion of Huifang fall and felt a rush of satisfaction go through her.
“I hope not,” Huifang replied. “I’m so nervous. This is the last inspection and maybe only two or three will be selected as noble concubines.”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Yehenara said, laughing softly. “Hardly anyone trips or faints at this point.” en's
Though Huifang recovered her smile and composed herself again, Yehenara had placed a seed of doubt in her mind. She hoped it would be enough to give her an edge. She moved on past Huifang and onto the next, already remembering Hsi-An’s primary weakness and preparing some tiny stumbling block with which to trip her up as well.
Since having been brought to the Forbidden City at age 16, Yehenara had made the best of the opportunity that was before her. As a concubine of the emperor, she and her family would move up in rank. In Qing China, rank was everything.
Having passed the initial selection process, which had included more than 300 other girls, Yehenara had focused her attention on either being better than her competition or trying to break their confidence. She also kept an eye on which of the tiring women were most focused on the craft of making their protégés look better and manipulated her way into becoming their protégé.
Yehenara had mastered the art of sounding sweet; having a sweet expression on her face and making comments that would degrade the other girls and then pretend that she was just being silly. Though there were a few who saw through it, most of the girls just thought of her as being overly friendly and something of a clown.
“Mercy, Lanfen,” Yehenara gasped and placed her hand on her mouth. “Is that a blemish? Oh, how sad. You’re so beautiful.”