by Declan Finn
And her eyes – a warm, liquid Frangelico brown with her Siberia-pale skin. Her dress was casual, covering everything, but it didn’t matter, she looked good in everything. It all seemed to be form-fitting, no matter the size. Jeans and a sweater should have covered her thoroughly, but somehow managed to be quite snug. Granted, it was a very nice form with curves that a Volvo would hug.
It gave him a warm feeling just thinking about her.
Yes, I have to stop it. Damnit.
After all, he was fully-healed, his bones knitted together, he had something else to focus on.
Staying alive in front of a half-dozen vampires.
Step one was easy. After the first three bodies were discovered around one construction site, Marco had no problem doing that math. He had contacted one of his people on the construction crew, and had them lay the groundwork for his attack.
But, hey, there are only six of them.
Marco was crouched on an I-beam twenty feet up from where he had set his trap.
This is going to be so easy.
There had been some concern about staying hidden against vampires, but apparently, vampires were just as stupid as everybody else – nobody looked up.
* * * *
This is going to be so easy. No one ever looks up.
On the top floor of the unfinished building stood a short, dark man, swathed in Armani and Prada. He was slender and unthreatening… until you looked at his eyes. The eyes were the tell – they were empty. Look at them too hard and too long, one could almost swear that they were lidless eyes of fire, straight out of Lord of the Rings, but most people never held his eyes that long.
The creature that looked like a human being gave a very tiny smile as he eyed his prey, Marco Catalano. It was strange to imagine that this child, this 19-year-old, had been such a threat. He wasn’t even that big – a 5’9” blond dancer. That was it.
The creature that commonly called itself “Mister Day” chuckled to himself. Dance of death, maybe.
But now, it was time for him to die. And Marco would never see him coming.
Marco opened with a salvo of glass phials filled with holy water. As the holy water burned them like acid, Marco dropped down onto another vampire he missed, taking his head off with a knife.
Marco moved before that vampire turned to dust. He threw his entire weight into the next vampire, and slammed a stake into the vampire’s chest, like a hammer blow. The vampire disintegrated into a pile of dust and clothing.
Marco spun, took the recently emptied jacket out of the air and hurled it at the third vampire, covering his face like a net.
Marco threw the stake in his hand, and it landed, point first, in the eye of the fourth vampire. Since the stake had been soaked in holy water, it not only penetrated the back of the eye socket, it lodged in the brain and started eating away at the gray cells. Undead or not, it was hard to focus when something was eating one’s brains.
Three down in a matter of seconds, Mister Day thought. Nicely done. The creature lowered itself into a crouch, studying his prey with admiration. Marco was mostly human; the only improvement that Day could perceive was some residual after effects of a vampire’s bite, but even that seemed to be mostly for healing fractures.
Fascinating. But, sadly, time to end it.
Day dropped from the I-beam of the top floor, and landed with a hard thud right behind Marco.
* * * *
Marco heard the heavy body land behind him and, despite himself, didn’t laugh. He merely gave a quick look over his shoulder, dropped his body in a bow, and shot his right foot backwards, cracking the newcomer in the sternum.
The newcomer only took a half-step back, and that was more than enough. The half-step took him onto a tarp.
This tarp, however, had nothing under it.
The newcomer fell from sight, dropping into the spikes of Marco’s tiger trap.
I’m so glad I had my guys put spikes in that this morning.
One of the vampires growled, “Allahu akbar!”
Marco blinked. “What?”
All three vampires charged.
Marco drew his dual squirt guns and fired, blasting the vampires in the face as they ran at him. They screamed and covered their eyes, but didn’t slow or stop.
Marco dove between two of the attackers, and let them keep running as they charged right into the pit with the wooden spikes.
And he never stopped smiling, even as they fell, screaming, to their deaths.
* * * *
In the pit, Mister Day growled in frustration. He had been spiked enough to count as a pin cushion. The spear that nailed him through the head was particularly annoying.
A face appeared at the edge of the pit. It was the target.
“Still alive?” He cocked his head to one side, surprised. “Oh well. I can solve that.”
Day snarled, and tried to calm himself. He could be free with one good roll, breaking the spikes. Then, maybe, if he felt charitable, he would throw Marco down here.
Then he heard the truck backing up.
Day cursed, then held his breath as the cement truck started to pour down on him, burying him alive.
Aw crap, not again.
Chapter 2: I’ll get you my pretty, and your little human, too
New York City, April 26th
Robert’s rules of order would frown on two disputants eating each other, but it was unlikely that the man who wrote the rules of conduct for meetings meant it to apply to vampires. (It certainly didn’t apply to werewolves, since packs were less of a democracy, and more of an enlightened dictatorship. Some charitable vampires thought that wolves invented hockey.)
These thoughts drifted through the mind of Amanda Colt as she wandered into the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall reserved for the meeting of the New York City Vampires Association. Of course, the NYC-VA didn’t have even ten percent of New York City’s vampire population. This was for the powerful, the affluent, or the really, really troublesome.
Amanda Colt didn’t know what category she fell under. She had never been invited to the NYC-VA before.
She wasn’t particularly rich. To normal people, as she lived in her Upper East Side 70th Street apartment, she was rich. To vampires, she was comfortable. It was an area where the cops had a good response time and people walked the streets at night. Really wealthy vampires (the types that lived in castles and estates, if they could) merely called her type “well invested: the nouveaux riches of the vampire world.” At the rate her investments were growing, if she broke two hundred (next century), she might be considered part of the club.
Amanda Colt wasn’t particularly powerful, either. She was as strong as the average vampire, maybe stronger (she had odd bursts of ability that surprised her, but that didn’t count). She didn’t have a nest, and her sphere of influence had only recently started. Until last year, her only power was, really, the power to turn heads.
However, Amanda Colt’s role as a troublemaker was assured, even though it wasn’t her fault. Her friend Marco Catalano was the focus of the trouble.
But these vampires thought of Marco as her human, so she was credited with his trail of destruction, including the recently re-killed, the property damage, and generally spreading so much fear through certain ranks of the vampire community that he bordered on being a terrorist.
So, Amanda didn’t quite know if she was supposed to be there as a member of the general assembly, or if she was there to be executed as a local troublemaker.
If it was the latter, and they tried to hold even the semblance of a trial, she was going to rip them a new one. Maybe a new three or four, while she was at it.
As she looked around the hall, she could recognize a few faces. There was a bar owner from the Blood Bank, an Upper East Side vampire bar not far from Mount Sinai Hospital; he was a gruff, burly fellow who had served as an Irish cop in the nineteenth century. Not far from him was Kalsey, a tall, well-built and well-dressed Anglo-Indian vampire who owned The Platelet.
Well, Kalsey had owned the Platelet, before Marco had gotten there. Amanda heard that its replacement was still under construction.
Though it didn’t seem like losing his major source of income had hurt Kalsey all that much. He still wore Armani, carried his well-crafted sword cane, and even had a Rolex Le President, top of the line gold.
However, for all that, Kalsey didn’t seem happy.
Amanda didn’t even bother sitting, but stood off to the side. The VFW hall was lined with collapsible chairs, set up in nice neat rows. However, she didn’t expect to be sitting much, especially if she was called to defend herself—verbally or physically.
The vampires on the dais were finally starting to file in. Amanda noted them, and she swore she knew some of them, but she couldn’t remember from where. The one in the center position was female, blonde, and about Amanda’s height, dressed casually in a comfortable leather jacket and blue jeans.
However, Amanda knew from experience that vampires were not socially advanced, nor matriarchal. To get to a position of power, you had to be powerful, not to mention manipulative, long-sighted, and willing to stab allies in the back… or whatever angle presented itself.
The blonde thwacked the gavel down on the table. “This is the twenty-second meeting of the 235th session of the New York City Vampires Association, President Jennifer Bosley presiding. I hereby call this meeting to order,” she said in a British accent that Amanda could narrow down to London. “First order of business. Reading of the minutes from the last meeting? Is there a motion?”
One of the committee members on the dais raised his hands. “Move to waive the reading?”
Three hands went up from the crowd. Jennifer banged the gavel and said, “Moved, and seconded. Is there any old business?”
One person stood up in the back of the room…it was a male vampire in a dress. “Yes,” he said in a thick accent. “I would like to object, once again, to acknowledging New York City as it currently stands. This place belongs to the British, and—”
President Jennifer Bosley slammed down the gavel again. “Edward, I said old business, not concluded business. For the last time, I don’t care how old you are, or if you were the royal governor, the entire continent has moved on. If you bring this up again, you’ll be banned from these meetings for another decade. Are we understood?” She dismissed the three hundred year old vampire as though he was already dead and dusty. “Next.”
The meeting went on for a while, and it covered a lot of the topics one would expect: border disputes, blood supplies, old grudges, territorial haggling due to the latest construction rearranging geographic markers. Vampire bureaucracy was like a regular bureaucracy, but worse, since some topics and situations could drag on for decades, if not centuries.
There was even one man complaining that Little Italy should declare war on Chinatown, because Chinatown was swallowing it whole, and “Back in the days when I was a Centurion in the Roman Empire—”
That one, at least, was cut off by a dozen different groans. Even President Jennifer Bosley seemed weary. She sighed and said, “Giuseppe, you weren’t part of an Empire. Mussolini’s ability was never as great as him ambition. You were a Sergeant in his army, and we’re still telling jokes about that. Now, shut up and sit down before we revoke your territory… what little is left of it. As it is, you’ll be hiding in your great-grandson’s basement in Howard Beach in another two decades. I hope you don’t mind swimming when it floods. Now, if that’s enough of old business…” Jennifer gave the room a glare that told them it was, and if they didn’t like it, she had a stake in the back room with their names on it. “New business?”
Kalsey jumped up from his seat so fast, Amanda half-expected him to shoot straight up to the ceiling. “Yes!” He thrust his cane at Amanda as though he were stabbing her. “She and her pet human destroyed my bar, slaughtered some of my most loyal and valuable retainers, then she had minions poison me with time-delay release Holy Water capsules. I demand that she, and her human, make full restitution.”
Jennifer Bosley nodded, then looked to Amanda. “We have had several notifications of this attack. Would anyone else like to add to this?”
“I would like to add something,” said Lynch, the Irish cop/bar owner. “My name is Patrick Lynch, I’m the owner of the Blood Bank.”
Amanda winced. This will not be good.
Jennifer Bosley nodded. “The chair acknowledges you, Proprietor Lynch. You have the floor.”
Lynch smiled easily. “That young lady and her man came into my pub the night before Mister Kalsey’s place had its unfortunate accident.”
Kasley whirled one Lynch. “Accident! Why you dirty Irish bastard!
Lynch ignored him. “Now, Madam President, you must understand,” he continued in a soft, gentle brogue. “Mister Kalsey and I are old competitors, going back a few decades. However, I bear the man no great animosity. When Mistress Colt and her young man came into my place, they merely wanted some information. Marco came in and—”
Jennifer held up a hand. “Who is this Marco?”
“The human in question. Marco Catalano, he called himself,” Lynch answered. “A pleasant enough fellow for an Italian, but he’s blond, so there must be some Celt, from back in the day when they owned Northern Italy. Anyway, he wanted some information, and one of my customers challenged him directly, and tried to kill him.”
There was a scattered murmur through the hall. Pet humans were considered private property. A good, reliable human was difficult to come by. It would be like taking a sledgehammer to somebody’s Porsche. If there was a problem with someone’s human, his or her vampire was the party that should be addressed, and attacked, if need be. Directly going after someone’s human was Just Not Done.
“Without any enhancements at all,” Lynch said, “he dealt with the troublesome customer himself, with no aid from Mistress Colt. Not even with aid of her bite.”
Amanda almost nodded, but wanted to maintain an air of cool impassivity. A vampire’s bite transferred a slight bit of the metaphysical virus that gave vampires their unique post-resurrection-like status; it helped keep the food stock alive, and it granted the ones they bit temporary preternatural strength. Also, it was something other vampires could sense. Marco had wanted to avoid having any augmentation at all when they went into the Blood Bank, for this very reason.
He was right again, she thought. I hate it when he’s right. If I tell him, he’ll be insufferable for days.
President Jennifer Bosley arched a brow. “Indeed?”
Lynch nodded. “So, I contend that Mistress Colt had no hand in the destruction of The Platelet, that Marco Catalano could have done it all by himself.”
“Bastard!” Kalsey barked. “What did you do, sic them both on me?”
Lynch merely smiled. “I did no such thing. I simply mentioned a few establishments that I knew obtained their blood supply through a less than savory source—like, directly from people.”
Jennifer Bosley tapped the gavel twice to cut off another outburst. “Presume for the moment that Amanda Colt’s human, Marco Catalano, did indeed act independently in the destruction of The Platelet. What would be the purpose?” She looked at Amanda this time. “What prompted your human’s destructive rampage?”
Amanda blinked, and slowly straightened. “Several of his people—by extension, my people—had been murdered by Mikhail the Bear. An issue which I tried to raise before this body, and was ignored.”
She glared around the room, and everyone went completely and utterly still, as still as only vampires could be. “I sent emails. I made phone calls. I did everything but send smoke signals. And no one considered stopping his expansion.”
After a moment, Jennifer Bosley cleared her throat. “Mikhail the Bear is an international authority, and is not bound to our local jurisdiction.”
“Da,” Amanda said courteously. “That is another way of saying that you were all too terrified to do anything about him when he was rampa
ging over all of our territories.”
Jennifer leaned forward, her dark brown eyes nearly black in the light. “Oh? And why are you using the past tense, young lady?”
Amanda cleared her throat. “Because last week, Mikhail the Bear was assassinated in Greenpoint, on the doorstep of Marco Catalano.”
The grave-like quality of the room exploded into a cacophony of ranting. There were expressions of disbelief, objections that Amanda was even still alive, and one thing above all that Amanda found most interesting…
There was an undercurrent of fear. Every vampire in that room was afraid. The President was the one who hid her fear the best.
“Mikhail was dangerous to all of us,” Amanda said, her voice rising above the din. She maintained eye contact with President Bosley. “He brought Vatican ninjas to our area. Where were you—all of you—when he was riding roughshod over Greenpoint? And Howard Beach? And Bensonhurst? And Maspeth, Queens? He killed FBI agents, MI-6 intelligence officers, and mafiosi, attracting attention that none of us want. Through all that time, this body did nothing. Not one thing.”
Jennifer Bosley rapped the gavel so hard, the crack sounded through the hall like a gunshot. “That aside, what does that have to do with the unwarranted attack on The Platelet?”
“Unwarranted?” Amanda asked. “Marco’s territory—my territory—had been invaded, and constantly under siege. Marco attacked any large gathering of less than savory vampires that might be in contact with Mikhail and his people.”
Lynch the bar owner stood. “I can vouch for that. That was the exact question I had been asked by her pet human.”
Kalsey glared from his seat. “And you gave him my bar?”
Lynch grinned at him. “Sure, lad, where else would I send him to find unsavory lowlifes?”
Kalsey smirked. “There are some places in the Village I could name.”
“Hey!” barked the male crossdresser from earlier. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jennifer Bosley rapped the gavel again. “One more outburst, and I am clearing the hall.” She looked to Amanda. “You claim that the human Catalano acted in self-defense.” She looked to Kalsey. “Were you approached by Mikhail the Bear at any time?”