The Vampire carefully lifted the girl from her coffin, still clad only in her slip-dress nightie, and carried her across the elegant apartment to the bed. Coffins were for transport, and convenience, but true Imago deserved comfort. It was going to be a long and arduous metamorphosis.
Their eye-contact did not part.
ACT OF GOD
Barry Dell moved through the Sydney apartment like the Act of God that he, well, he sort of was.
It hadn’t taken him long to confirm that Canon had brought five henchmen with him to Australia, if indeed you could call them henchmen. They were really more like guard dogs, despite their technically human-level intelligence that aided them in the hunt. These ‘non-Imago’ Vampires, as Gabriel had mentioned the Imago Vampires like Canon referred to them, were guarding the entry of the apartment’s inner rooms as well as they could have been expected to.
These were sad creatures. They followed Canon like faithful hounds, cowed by his age and his intellect and his shocking viciousness, loyal to him because he kept them clean and tidy and well-fed on choice human victims, and gave them comfortable places to hide from the sun. They weren’t quite domesticated, but they might have been an emergent breed that came close.
The care and attention wasn’t enough to keep them from degenerating, but it was enough to keep them a step above the true Vampires of sewer and hospital sub-basement and underground parking hall. A small step.
Not one of them would have passed for human. Their mouths lolled open, lower jaws hanging against their chests like loose collars of beige leather, studded with decayed and stinking pegs of teeth. Their fangs curved out from their upper jaws like tusks, and it was these they attacked with, slashing their heads from side to side like wild pigs and, in the normal course of things, depending on the victim’s own blood vessels to spray the nutrients down their gaping throats.
Gabriel had told Barry that the spittle of Vampires acted to heal the wounds of those they attacked, leaving human authorities with a body that had suffered a tragic brain aneurysm or heart failure, rather than massive blood loss and trauma. The saliva, according to Gabriel, only appeared to work post-mortem and only on Vampire-inflicted injuries. There had been experiments, the Archangel said, in harvesting Vampire saliva for medical purposes. The results had been unpleasant, but at least had not caused an outright Vampire plague. Transformation didn’t work like that. Gabriel was vague, as he so often was, on the subject of where little Vampires came from. Metaphorically speaking.
Most of the time, the natural diet of Vampires made their bite a perfect adaptation – the old and the infirm died of brain aneurysm and heart failure all the time. And as the human population rose, and the Vampire population rose to feed upon it, the sorts of conditions that could easily replace ‘Vampire mauling’ on post-mortem paperwork became steadily more numerous, more severe, more widespread.
Barry shook his head and tried to focus on the problem at hand, not that much attentiveness was required. He’d dispatched two of the five shambling goons, smashing them to the ground and reducing them to ash in absolute silence. He wasn’t even sure himself how he was doing it. He was just glad he’d managed to avoid doing it to the assorted human ne’er-do-wells he’d done battle with recently.
Three remained. These Vampires had been groomed by Canon – trained, essentially, to act as security in cases when the human security guards he paid for would be inconvenient. They may once have had a better-than-even chance of becoming members of that higher caste among the Vampires, those known as Imago. That time, however, and that opportunity had passed.
With a hiss, another of the creatures swept towards him from the shadows. It moved fast, but as far as Barry Dell was concerned it may as well have been standing still. Barry made it no more. And then there were two.
He stepped through into the next set of opulent rooms, the boots he’d picked up from a local charity place clomping with satisfying heaviness on the thick carpet. Now he was close to Canon’s innermost sanctum. He could hear soft sounds, whimpers and murmurs, no more than ten metres away on the other side of the nearest wall. And more than that – he could feel the Vampire, smell it … but none of his human senses were involved. The Imago stood out against the backdrop of human consciousness and the low mutter of lesser Vampire unthought like a burning flare. And, just like Gabriel had said, Canon wasn’t alone.
The final two goons came at him from opposite directions, hoping in their muddy and directionless way to catch him between them and rend him to pieces. Barry stepped back, obliterated one, turned, repeated, and stepped through the wall into Canon’s bed chamber.
There was a predictable detonation, and a lot of brick and plaster filled the air for a moment. Dell saw through it.
“Canon!” he thundered. When he thundered, Barry was coming to realise and enjoy, it was hardly even a figure of speech.
The Vampire raised his head and saw Barry standing under an archway of shattered redbrick wall, dressed in clothes that would look more at home on a drunken derelict and scarcely improved by the smears of greasy former-Vampire ash. His wings were outstretched and his Angelic glory was radiating from him in full force.
A lesser creature would have taken a moment to look at that. Canon, while he had lived over a thousand years and had never encountered an Angel, and had not until that moment so much as suspected Angels even existed, was not a lesser creature.
A little voice beneath him on the bed screamed, the sound finally able to escape now that the Imago’s burning eyes weren’t pinning it inside its owner’s throat. The throat and the scream and the little voice all belonged to an exquisite young girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, lying ramrod-straight on the massive bed like a virgin sacrifice. Barry could see the girl – Laetitia, according to the information Gabriel had shared with him – because Canon was no longer leaning over her. He’d hurtled backwards almost before the chunks of brick had begun to ricochet off the adjacent walls.
He moved considerably faster than his henchmen were capable of doing. He was fast. He crossed the room, grabbed some personal items from a nearby dresser, straightened his clothes as best he could considering the fact that they were flapping wildly in the air, and stepped out of the room through the hole Barry had made. Had he done it any faster, there would have been a sonic boom. As it was, the still-flying dust and rubble was whipped into a spiral and sand-blasted the walls as a result of the Vampire’s passage.
But the Angel was faster. And he was furious. He moved into step beside Canon as the Vampire slid through the gap in the wall at close to the speed of sound, reached up and placed his fingers almost gently over the top of the creature’s head, and then stopped moving abruptly.
Canon’s body, suddenly directionless, crashed into the far wall and exploded into the ash it should have become over a thousand years before. The head stayed behind in Barry’s outstretched hand. And it was still alive.
It screamed. Silently, lacking lungs and most of its vocal cords, but the eyes and mouth and jaws twisted hideously.
Barry turned and bashed the gaping thing judiciously against the crumbled edge of the bedroom wall, face-first, two, three, four, five times. There was a sound of things breaking behind Canon’s pretty face, and the scalp shuddered once under Barry’s fingers. The head’s attendant muscles relaxed, the fangs slid out of their sheaths and dangled lifelessly over its battered chin like a pair of bananas. They were enormous. Canon’s mouth lolled open, his cheeks – bereft of their structural support – sank, but his bleeding eyes remained conscious, alert.
At this point, Barry’s cheap sense of theatricality led him to say something silly, and later on – almost immediately, in fact – he was glad that there’d only been the dying head of Canon to hear it.
“More like Imagone.”
Canon’s eyes locked on the Angel’s, but the deadly hypnotic gaze slid away as if Barry’s face was a pane of indestructible glass. The massive fangs slid in and out of
their sheaths hesitantly, then relaxed again. Canon’s head went still.
Barry turned and hurried to the bed, hurling the head away as he went. It landed in the still-lit fireplace in a shower of sparks, and proceeded to flare up as merrily as only a thousand-year-old piece of dried lumber can. The Angel hesitated over the shaking body of the little Vampire girl, then stepped out and picked up a trench coat belonging to one of Canon’s goons. Shaking the ash off it briskly, he stepped back to the bedside and wrapped it around the semi-naked Laetitia, who then started to cry like a normal human child.
“Come on,” Barry said quietly. “We’re getting out of here.”
Halfway out the door, the Angel stopped. He crossed back to the fire, moving almost normally now, reached in and pulled out Canon’s skull. He turned it back and forth. It looked startlingly like the skull of a sabre-toothed cat he had seen in a museum once, fused unnaturally with the skull of a human. The flames had seared it into a single slightly-melted-looking piece and polished it to an impressive glossy black. He tucked it into his satchel and turned to go.
Laetitia, in the few seconds it had taken Barry to grab his trophy, had scampered away into the suite of rooms. He found her easily – she’d crawled into her coffin and was weeping as she struggled to close the lid.
Barry sighed, then hung back and studied the coffin. Barry’s means of locomotion was raw and fast and would be frightening, perhaps even physically harmful to near-mortal flesh. He didn’t quite manage aeroplane speed or altitude, but it was still rough. If she felt safe in the coffin and wouldn’t make a fuss, and provided he could lift it, it might make more sense to transport her in the box anyway. An Angel carrying a small coffin wasn’t that much more attention-arresting than just an Angel, so either way he was going to have to keep himself concealed.
Barry waited, let Laetitia seal herself in the glossy black coffin, and then stepped up to secure it. Canon had had the creepy foresight to custom-build a casket that could be locked from the outside and not opened from the inside … although now Barry thought about it, that really sort of made sense for all coffins. For all he knew, the Vampire hadn’t actually made this coffin to any unusual specifications.
“Better get started while there’s still some night left,” he muttered, and grasped the coffin by its two central handles. He grunted, muttered “fuck me,” and hefted the box against his chest.
It was going to be a long flight.
STAKEOUT (NOT ACTUALLY A PUN)
Seam, Tommo, Nutter, and Little Phil had been waiting in the pub since night fell. It was a Friday, so they felt justified in a couple of pints.
The four Sheepbreezers had only a vague idea what their Angelic mate had been up to since his departure the previous Thursday, but what they knew was hair-raising enough.
“He has to fly the whole way,” Seam said. “There are a couple of little churches in the middle and a few sacred Aboriginal grounds that serve the same purpose, but he said they take some finding. If he gets the hang of flying quickly, he can make it in two nights. But he has to stop by dawn, or he’s a goner.”
“He’d just drop into a coma in the middle of the desert?” Tommo said, wide-eyed. “Like, ten thousand feet in the air?”
Seam nodded. “Flying west to east is harder,” he said, “because you’re going against the sun,” he swept one hand over the other, crisscrossing them. “Nights are shorter – only by a few minutes, but it depends how fast you’re going and it’s hard to gauge. And the dawn sneaks up on you,” Gabriel had told this to Barry in the course of training him in long-distance flight, and Barry had passed it on to Seam during one of their afternoon church-chats. “It’s a tough call for his first flight.”
“Bloody Hell,” Little Phil said reverently. “Forget about running out of petrol halfway between towns, eh? Imagine dropping out of the bloody sky when the sun comes up.”
“Did you see him fly?” Tommo asked a little wistfully.
“Couple of times,” Seam said, smiling to himself. Barry had shown him the occasional flap-around and a couple of loop-the-loops, but for the most part, over the past few weeks, it had been Gabriel running the show and monopolising Barry’s time. The Angel and the Archangel had been training, somewhere inconspicuous, doing – in Seam’s imagination – the whole wise-mentor-and-hot-headed-rookie thing. ‘Inconspicuous’ was a pretty tall order, for two human-sized figures with six-metre wingspans. Regardless of their ability to avoid notice.
“What was it like?” Tommo pressed.
Seam shrugged. “Actually, kinda like a cheesy movie effect,” he admitted. “You know, like those flying dudes in Flash Gordon?” he sighed slightly even before Little Phil and Nutter shook their heads. They might have known of it, but they didn’t know it. Of the Sheepbreezers, only Seam and Tommo and Nails himself had really spent much time watching old cult movies while experiencing the effects of various substances. Tommo, to his credit, was grinning and nodding – although he looked a bit puzzled by the comparison. “It looked like he was swinging around on a wire,” Seam tried to clarify, “only the wings and the movement looked too real for the whole thing to be an effect. I guess it was sort of like … the only way I could grasp what was happening was if it was happening in a movie, because that’s where shit like that happens, so my brain looked at it like a special effect. People don’t have wings and fly around – that’s birds, right? So he should’ve looked like a bird, only he … uh, didn’t.”
The others nodded thoughtfully and drank their beers. The four of them were actually drinking quite heavily, Seam suddenly reflected as he looked at the empty pints arranged on the table, waiting for their friend’s return in the manner to which they were accustomed. It was a vigil of sorts, since none of them had any idea where Barry was at this point or when he would be back – or if he was still alive.
Or even if alive is the right term, Seam added silently to himself, and drank again.
They’d been at the Bad Cow since finishing work – in Seam’s case, that had been half-past three in the afternoon but he’d shown up anyway, as if Barry was likely to show up while the sun was still out. Whether he would even be back that night, nobody was sure. If he’d arrived before dawn today, he would have made his appearance at nightfall … but he hadn’t spent the day in the church – of that, at least, Seam could be sure.
Barry had told them he was likely to be a week, give or take a few days. They’d been showing up and waiting for him for a few hours each night since Wednesday.
Seam, if he was being honest, had been finding reasons to drop by the church, the bar, and a couple of neighbouring establishments every night since Barry had left. He’d bumped into one or two of the Sheepbreezers in the process, most regularly Tommo, and they’d exchanged sheepish acknowledgements that yeah, it was too soon to worry, no worries, of course everything was fine, but obviously they couldn’t help coming to check. Nails was a mate. These encounters were not to be spoken of, lest an unseemly level of concern and sentiment be exposed … but waiting for an Angel to come back from a Vampire-slaying mission was uncharted territory, sentiment-wise.
The church remained stubbornly empty aside from Father Bryant, who as the week progressed began more and more often to sport this puzzled facial expression as though he was waking up and wondering if the past two months had been a delusion. Seam didn’t think the vicar would actually convince himself that Barry had never existed – let alone Gabriel – but the sooner the Angel returned, the better. As for where the Archangel was, Seam had no idea. Preston Point Anglican was unoccupied, that was all Seam was sure of. They could both be in another church for all he knew. It wasn’t like he had the time to go checking every piece of holy ground in the city.
And Gabriel was unlikely to share anything with Seam. The Archangel had never even really acknowledged him as a separate entity, but only ever as a sort of slightly-embarrassing mortal residue that Barry was clinging to like a security blanket. And Seam had long since come to the conclusio
n that he was perfectly happy with that arrangement.
Angels, Seam supposed, had a bit of a sentiment code of their own when it came to dealing with humans, and it sort of made sense. Barry was still too close to it all, but eventually … well, centuries were going to pass, weren’t they? The Sheepbreezers would die. Everybody would die. And Barry and his six fellow Angels would be alone. Well, alone aside from the occasional smart Vampire – what had Barry said the smart Vampires called themselves? Imago, or something like that – and the pair of Demons lurking somewhere in the shadows beneath the edifice of human civilisation.
And the Sleeper.
Not for the first time, Seam wondered if the Sleeper was really just an Angel who had gotten so lonely she’d found a nice comfortable hole to curl up in away from holy ground, and just given up on the world.
If that was the case, though, Seam couldn’t help but think there’d be more than one of her.
There didn’t seem to be much more to discuss about Barry’s supposed flight to Sydney and back, or how tacky he looked when he used his wings. Nutter desultorily flipped over the remains of that day’s paper, beer-stained and crumpled, that had been lying on the table when they’d arrived. Tommo pulled another piece of it, that happened to include the front page, towards him.
“Can’t believe these fucking Yanks,” Tommo said after a few moments’ silent contemplation and a cleansing beer-swallow. He spoke more, Seam thought, out of a desire to say something – anything – than out of any particular animosity towards the United States of America or its population.
Little Phil leaned over and glanced at the story to which Tommo was referring. “I can’t believe something that happened over there two bloody months ago is still getting on the front page,” he rumbled, his pint looking tiny and frightened in his baseball-mitt-sized hand, “and the Bulldogs winning goes to page eight or some shit.”
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