by Raven Hart
She rolled the car window down a few inches and yelled, “Especially the female impersonator. See you at eight!”
The cobwebs finally cleared from my mind, and I stepped out into the street behind her as she drove away.
“Say what?”
Eleven
William
Will met me at Olivia’s just after sundown. Olivia and all her vampires save Donovan, who had retired to a back room to recuperate, gathered in the foyer to see us off. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Olivia asked.
“Not this time,” I said. “But be ready. If all goes well, I’ll return later tonight with the knowledge of where she is and what it will take to get her out. Then I expect I shall be calling on all of you.”
“Good luck,” Olivia said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek.
“How about a wee snog for Willie boy, then?” Will suggested.
“Talk to me when you rescue Renee. Then who knows what you might get,” Olivia said.
With that exchange, we set off and took the nearest entry into the sewer tunnels. I asked will, “Did Hugo and Diana question you about where you were last night?”
“Nah. I’m my own man. They don’t tell me where to go and what to do.”
His answer sounded like youthful bravado. I decided to support his posturing. “I’m glad to hear it. I feared Hugo might still be trying to dominate you.”
Will looked as if he would speak again but cut himself off.
“Have you thought about your future?” I asked him.
“My what?” He sounded slightly confused.
“When Diana and Hugo realize that you helped me steal Renee back from them, you’ll be in serious jeopardy. You really should come back to Savannah with me,” I told him.
A brief, bitter laugh escaped him. “What? And give up all of this?” He kicked at a lump of unidentifiable garbage and made an expansive gesture at the muck-covered sewer walls.
“I’m serious. Hugo is going to want to kill you, and your mother may not be able to protect you from him this time.”
“If I go to Savannah with you, I’ll have to follow your rules, won’t I? I remember hunting with you there. You wouldn’t let me kill anyone.”
“You can still feed off humans, you just can’t kill. And of course, you can’t call attention to the fact that you’re a blood drinker.”
“Like I said, mate. I’m my own man.”
“At least think about it.”
Will seemed to be doing just that as we continued walking. Finally he said, “I imagine your man Jack would be thrilled if I moved into town to compete for Daddy’s affections.”
“Jack would adjust,” I said. His mention of Jack reminded me of a more serious problem. At least three people were sworn to see Will dead. Two—Iban and Jack—were powerful vampires who, if they ever got the opportunity, would kill him on sight for what he did to Sullivan. The other, Melaphia, was the most powerful voodoo mambo in the hemisphere and would kill him for helping kidnap her baby. If that weren’t enough, the human police officer Consuela Jones wouldn’t hesitate to lock him up, knowing he would burn to a crisp in a jail cell when the sun came up. I couldn’t very well blame any of them. But I still wanted my son. I had to think of a solution.
We walked awhile longer, the foul effluvia of a modern industrial city wafting around us. At last we reached an area where a profusion of vines and roots grew down from the surface and out from the sides of the tunnel as if we stood under a mass of vegetation. Will stooped and began to pull vines away from a depression in the floor of the sewer, which turned out to be a narrow opening leading to a pit.
“This is it,” he said. “Do you want me to come with you to the cavern?”
“No. Hide yourself nearby, though. I’ll call for you through the voodoo blood if I need you.”
“You’ll what?”
“We’ll be able to communicate short distances without speaking. You’ll know when it happens.”
“Just like my sire can…unless I block his thoughts?”
“Something like that, yes. Now I must go.”
I grasped the tree roots at the edge of the void and lowered myself downward. Above me I heard Will clear his throat, and I looked up.
“Uh, good luck,” he said sheepishly, as if any show of goodwill were a sign of weakness on his part. “I hope you find the little princess. That’s what I call her—the little princess.”
“Thank you.” I held his gaze for a moment before I plunged onward.
I climbed down the narrow passage until the soil stopped smelling of rotten waste and began to smell of earth, though not clean, wholesome earth. There was an odor of a different kind of decay, something vastly more fetid, more poisonous. My rage built at the thought of Renee being taken to such a horrid place. And yet a sense of excitement began to course through my very blood. Will had told me he could sense Renee in the pit. With my stronger connection to her via the voodoo blood, I was beginning to feel as if she were standing right beside me. And the sensation of being near her was growing stronger the farther down I climbed.
At last I felt a firmness beneath my feet and realized I’d come to the cavern of which Will had spoken. I could hear the distant sound of an underground waterfall. But there was something else, too: Voices rose up from below me. Will had believed there was another opening in the earth leading downward from where I was standing, and that Renee could be found there.
It sounded as if at least two people were coming up from below. I hurried to hide behind a cluster of boulders that looked to be the result of some ancient, subterranean landslide. I harnessed the carefully honed powers of my mind and the strength of the voodoo blood to mask myself from detection and concentrated on blocking my outgoing thoughts, fighting to leave my mind open to any contact from Will.
With my superior eyesight, I could see through the darkness. Diana came into view, sending a series of conflicting emotions through me—longing, lust, rage. She was dressed in the modern style of sleek trousers and a clinging sweater. Her only concession to the fact that she was meters underground and not out shopping the tony boutiques of London were her heavy Wellington boots.
Beside her was a male vampire appearing to be perhaps forty human years old. I recognized him immediately and along with that recognition came a deep wave of revulsion the likes of which I had not felt in hundreds of years. It was the ancient blood drinker, my grandsire, known to me by another name. I wished that I had been able to kill him when I’d first tried, when I’d first had a chance.
“Your presentation went quite well, my dear,” Ulrich said. “They could have eaten out of your hand.”
Though he was perhaps better groomed, Ulrich looked much the same as he had when I’d last seen him. He had a grayish beard and shoulder-length brown hair that was also shot with gray. He was garbed in black from head to toe. Tall and thin with broad shoulders, he could have passed for a college professor, or perhaps someone in the arts. But I knew him to be a butcher and a sadist, the cruelest of my kind I’d ever met.
Diana beamed. In a different time, she might have been mistaken for a young Grace Kelly. Her golden hair flowed about her shoulders in a rich cascade, framing her classically beautiful face. She turned a gaze of adoration on Ulrich that produced a new wave of nausea in my gut. In spite of my disgust, I had the presence of mind to wonder as to Hugo’s whereabouts. What could Hugo’s role be in Diana and Ulrich’s plan?
“Do you really think so?” she said, fluttering her long lashes. “How do you know?”
“I could feel it,” Ulrich said. “Their power vibrates within me even now. Can’t you feel it as well?”
Diana looked uncertain, but she seemed to know what answer he expected. “Yes,” she agreed. “Of course. I can feel the power, too.”
“Soon we’ll be sharing in that power.” Ulrich reached out and roughly pulled her against him. “With you at my side, we will be the most powerful force in the world of the blood drinke
rs. Under our influence and command, we will use the vampires to rule the human world as well. There is no end to what we can do. No force will be strong enough to stop us.”
“I can’t wait for that day,” Diana said. “I’d follow you into the depths of hell.”
“That sounds like a plan,” he said, and laughed.
“Tell me, do you think we will wind up being quite so…ugly as they are?”
Ulrich laughed again. “You and I could never be ugly. We will rule from this plane. We need not stay underground and tend the eternal fire like them. Perhaps you would like me to sample some of your beauty now.”
Ulrich gave her a punishing kiss. As he groped her, she began fumbling at the fastening of his trousers. I had no desire to watch my wife have sex with another man. I turned my back to the boulders and tried to block out the sounds of their animalistic coupling.
My mind began to replay the images I’d so recently seen of Diana in her bath with a naked Hugo, and I concentrated on pushing them away. They were replaced with another unbidden memory, an older one, though so vivid that it could be happening before me. I did not want to see these things. It was as if I, too, could feel the power that Ulrich spoke of, the power that could only come from being so close to the dark lords.
Perhaps it was their collective evil that took me back to one of the most malignant and depraved episodes I have ever witnessed in my long existence.
The year was 1888. I’d grown weary of the hardships of war and reconstruction in my adopted city of Savannah. My offspring, Jack, had become self-sufficient in the years since I made him a blood drinker, and I’d trained him to manage my various business interests. So I decided to take a sabbatical from the war-torn South and all its political and social problems and return to the land of my birth for a change of scene. I much preferred the countryside when I came to visit England, but I had some business to transact in London, so I rented rooms at a fashionable address.
I was having a drink and a game of cards at a gentleman’s club one night when I sensed a fellow blood drinker enter the establishment. The thrum of familiarity coursing through my body meant this was not just any vampire, but one of my own bloodline. I could tell it was not my sire, Reedrek, but I had no idea what this one’s relationship could be to me.
Recognising me as well, he sat down next to me and ordered a brandy. He reeked of the kill. He hailed me as kin, and introduced himself as my cousin.
“I’ve just had the most satisfying meal,” he said. He was bold, taking scant care to cover his fangs as he drank. “I’ve something to show you, if you’d care to accompany me to Whitechapel.”
I must admit I went with him as much out of curiosity as hunger, even though I had not recently fed. As we walked, the streets became more dingy with oppressive darkness and gloom. Men smoked evil-smelling cigars in the doorways of dimly lit shops. Bareheaded women clustered by twos and threes in openings to densely darkened alleys, shuddering against the damp and cold. Wretched-looking children darted in and out of unlighted passageways and up and down staircases. We passed a preacher stinking of rum who was being heckled by a few of the wayward youths thereabouts, and I remember a shoeblack waving his rag in a vain attempt to sell us his services.
“Where are we going?” I said finally. The sun would be up in a few hours’ time and our walk seemed to be endless. If we were hunting, we had already passed up many suitable candidates. Any one of the adults we’d seen could have been easily separated from their friends with a few subtle, wooing words and a bit of glamour to go with them. A coin would separate some even faster.
“Have patience,” my cousin said. After what seemed like hours, he led me around a corner and stopped in front of a dingy flat marked 13 MILLER’S COURT. As he opened the door he smiled and showed me in as if he were the host of a grand estate.
While Reedrek’s protege, I had been a rapacious killer of both men and women, yet I only took their life’s blood to sustain me. I have killed out of hunger, out of pity, and out of rage, but never for sport. The scene that lay before me in Miller’s Court was inexplicable even to one as savage as myself.
The room was awash in blood, gore, and body parts. What once was a young woman lay butchered and in pieces, barely recognizable as the remains of a human being. I looked to my host with utter disbelief. He smiled, exposing his fangs, which still bore bits of flesh. “Poor Mary,” he said. “She was an Irish lass, lately of Wales.”
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked. I knew it was not to feed, for the blood of the already dead is abhorrent to the vampire.
“For entertainment, of course,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might have seen the newspaper headlines of late. I wanted to illustrate that your kin is a celebrity.”
From time to time I am astonished at the depth of my lingering regard for humanity. It is both my blessing and my curse. It is what led me to make Jack McShane into a blood drinker when I saw him using the last of his life’s energy attempting to save his fellow soldier on a blood-sodden battlefield. It has broken my heart as I held a perishing friend who refused my offer of immortal life. It was this unaccountable regard that now caused such an explosion of righteous anger that I laid hold of the savage vampire’s lapels and led him outside. I dragged him into the nearest pitch-black alley and slammed him against the brick wall hard enough to crack a mortal’s skull.
My fangs lengthened and my rage rose until a fine mist of blood began to emanate from my skin. I levitated off the ground and pressed my face close to his, searching his eyes for any sign of reason or sanity, much less humanity. I saw none.
“You swine,” I spat. “You’re Jack the Ripper!”
Jack
“Help, Uncle Jack!”
“I’m coming, Renee! Where are you?” I was running as fast as I could. A white rabbit came out of nowhere, running beside me. “Oh dear! I shall be too late!” it said, and disappeared down a rabbit hole in front of me. I heard Renee’s cries again and realized they were coming from the hole, so I jumped in after the rabbit.
Down, down, down I fell, and the heat got worse the lower I fell.
I was headed to hell.
“Jack! Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
I opened my eyes to see Reyha’s face looming above my own. She patted my cheeks gently. I let her help me out of my coffin and took some deep breaths.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks. It was just a bad dream, like you said.” Renee’s voice and the feeling of her near me were so real I was still shaking. “You run along upstairs and check on Melaphia and Deylaud.” She scampered up the stairs and I went to pour myself some blood and whiskey.
The liquor calmed my nerves, and so did the hot shower that I took once I polished off the whiskey. I told myself that the dream meant nothing and hoped with all my heart—if I still had one—that what I told myself was true.
I was glad I had something to distract me—I had a date, a real date, with Connie Jones. Of course, seeing a female impersonator perform in a goth nightclub that I helped finance would not have been my choice for a first date, but vampires couldn’t be choosers. Not when it came to matters of the heart, that is. And not if the vampire was me.
I dressed up in black jeans and boots and a burnt orange dress shirt that matched my brand new Number eight Dale Junior belt buckle. I went upstairs to check on Mel and the twins before I set off. As usual, they were at the kitchen table, the center of life in William’s house.
“You look so handsome,” Reyha enthused. She was still limping, but I noticed she had ditched the crutches.
“My, my, you surely do look good,” Melaphia said.
“Thank you, ladies,” I said with a little bow, happy that Mel sounded so normal. If she remembered implying that I was a monster the night before, she didn’t show it. For my part, I was determined to put it out of my mind.
Reyha asked, “Where are you going all dressed up?”
“Werm is opening
his nightclub tonight.”
“I went over there earlier and blessed it for him,” Mel said.
I was amazed to hear that Mel was getting out and around. As far as I knew, going to Werm’s club was the first time she’d left the house since Renee was kidnapped. “That was sweet of you,” I said. “I’m sure he appreciated that. What did you ask the loas for?”
“I asked that the club be made safe—and profitable. I think Werm will particularly appreciate the profitability part.” Mel had put on a colorful shirt and tied her dreadlocks back with a sassy red ribbon. She looked practically back to normal. The human mind has a great capacity to heal itself.
Deylaud looked better, too. Still in human form, he sat reading at the kitchen table. He looked up and smiled, then returned his attention to his book.
“How was your day other than blessing Werm’s club?”
“Connie came to see us,” Reyha said.
“She came to see Melaphia,” Deylaud corrected.
Melaphia was working on what looked like a new beading project. The strange doll was gone. “Connie said she might talk to you,” I said. “I put my foot down about that little trip she wanted me to make with her. She didn’t take it well at first. I expect you backed me up—told her how dangerous it was—right?”
“We talked about it, yes,” Mel said. “She told me she was going to be your date for the club opening.” She looked up from her beading to fix me with a cautionary look. “Be careful, Jack. You know what I told you before.”
“Vampires and goddesses don’t mix. I remember.”
“Don’t do anything that you’ll regret, like letting her hurt you. And I don’t mean your feelings.”
“I won’t. I promise.” I went around the table and kissed everyone’s cheeks, even Deylaud’s. “I’ll be home before I turn into a pumpkin. I promise.”
Connie had really gotten into the goth thing for the night. She’d even put on some pale makeup, black eyeliner, and red, red lipstick. It was a pretty hot look, to tell you the truth. She wore a black sequined pants suit and a long red duster and red high heels. Be still my little bloodsucking heart.