Clan Novel Lasombra: Book 6 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Richard E. Dansky

  The two downstairs sounded like they were still bickering. Perfect. The door was only a few feet behind him, hidden in the shadow behind a massive column of machinery. For the first time since he’d been thrown to the wolves, he dared to hope.

  And that’s when the shadow Baughman had been easing into decided to expedite the process, and swallowed him whole.

  “Oh, fu—” was all he had time to say before it was over. The AK-47 clattered to the metal of the walkway, alerting the two vampires down below. They looked up, laughed, and walked out.

  MacEllen was right on schedule, and so were they.

  Friday, 13 August 1999, 12:58 AM

  Baltimore Street

  Buffalo, New York

  Sheldon and Mary walked down Baltimore Street without a care in the world. They were hunting Camarilla vampires, and they didn’t care if the whole city knew it. Sheldon was tall and thin, with a runner’s build and a computer geek’s complexion. He wore camouflage pants and shitkicker boots, and had a motherfucking big pistol jammed into his waistband. His head was shaved but his arms were hairy enough to make it look like he could lie down in front of a fire and play bearskin rug.

  Mary was, by contrast, short and stocky, and looked like she’d done time in a car crusher in the not-too-distant past. She dressed like a preacher’s worst nightmare of a drugged-out earth mother, and was dragging a baseball bat behind her on the asphalt. Her partner looked anxious and gleeful; she just looked pissed off.

  “Goddamned sonnovabitch has got to be around here somewhere,” muttered Sheldon. “Briefing said the ugly little bastard holed up in this part of town, so we just have to find whatever hole he’s in and plug it with this.” He took the pistol, a battered Desert Eagle, out of his belt and waved it around.

  “You can be such an asshole,” his packmate replied without heat. “We’re chasing a Nossie. Fucker probably heard you coming two blocks off, ducked into the sewers and is halfway to Cleveland by now. All because you had to haul your metal-plated dick out of your pants and wave it around. Dipshit.”

  “Who you calling a dipshit?” Sheldon stopped, turned on his heel, and stared down at Mary. “MacEllen put me in charge of the team, so if you call me a dipshit again, I’ll blow the top of your ugly head off.”

  “Try it and I’ll rip your balls off.”

  “You can’t reach that high.”

  “She’s right. You are a dipshit.”

  The voice came from a point about five feet behind where Sheldon stood, and from a figure who hadn’t been there a minute before. He had a face like the business end of a dumpster, and a massive bulge rose beneath the back of his tatty tan trench coat. His left arm stuck out at an odd angle, and in his right hand he held something that could only be a Zippo.

  “Well hello, little ratboy,” breathed Sheldon. “We’ve been looking for your ass, and now that we’ve found it, we’re gonna stomp it flat.” Mary fanned out to his right, while Sheldon brought the Desert Eagle in line with the Nosferatu’s head. “Just hold still and this will only hurt like hell.”

  “Idiot,” said Dustin very clearly, as he squeezed the trigger on the nozzle of the plant sprayer that he’d run up his left sleeve. With his right hand, he flicked the lighter into a blaze and brought the flame into contact with the stream of diesel fuel jetting out of the plant sprayer’s nozzle.

  The jet of flame it produced was impressive. The effect the wash of flame had on the two vampires it played over was even more so. Sheldon had no time for a scream; Mary barely a half-second more in which to try before the fire turned her face to a ruin and washed down her throat to crisp her from the inside.

  Dustin swept the flame over the two writhing figures dispassionately for another minute, until he was sure they weren’t getting back up. “Darwin would have loved you two, you know?” he said, and loped off into the distance to find more targets.

  Friday, 13 August 1999, 2:12 AM

  Outside the General Donovan Building

  Buffalo, New York

  “So what do we have here?” MacEllen jabbed down at the map with a long-nailed finger. His face was flushed and red, and his shirt collar was wet with beads of blood sweat. He’d just finished his sweep of the Bethlehem steel plant, and could barely contain his nervous energy. The scouting report had been absolutely perfect. The city was being held with a screen of recently Embraced neonates, a few slack-ass ghouls, and one or two real vampires who were being hung out to dry to sell the thing. Somewhere Hell had frozen over, because Polonia’s info had been spot on. Of course, that didn’t mean this was easy. There were a lot of the fresh-faced bastards, and they fought like demons. Once he caught himself missing Tolliver, but there was nothing to be done. The battle was being fought here and now.

  Adele, her face covered by a fine sheen of bloody sweat, laid a talon of her own on the map and pointed to an area not far from where they stood. “We’ve got some kind of trouble here. Scaz said he saw, if you believe this, a Nosferatu with a flame-thrower. Whatever’s over there, though, we haven’t heard from Sheldon and Mary in half an hour, and that was where they were supposed to be.”

  “Flame-thrower, huh.” MacEllen scratched his right armpit absently. “You’d think toting around fire would drive him apeshit.”

  Adele tapped the map, twice. “I’m not sure I believe the report. Scaz is also prone to eating bugs and throwing himself off of buildings to see how much it hurts. On the other hand, assuming the information’s good, I suspect it’s a lot easier to be brave about fire when the big fat nozzle of flaming death is pointed away from you.” She stared at MacEllen until he took his finger off the map, then lifted it off the table herself and folded it. “Other than that one setback, though, we’re sweeping the city. Resistance is stiff but incompetent, just like we’d been told it would be.” She listened to the headset she wore for a second, and then nodded. “Okay, Delaware Park is cleaned out. Three babies with three big guns. They jumped out of the trees screaming, and Einar took them out, no mess.” There was some crackling from the headset. “Hang on. Watts wants you to know that it took him all of ninety seconds, and that you owe him something that I really don’t want to think about. In other words, it’s all under control except this one little area.”

  MacEllen grunted something that might have been distracted approval. Losing even two vampires on something that was supposed to be a milk run, after all, would not help him look good at the next war council. The problem, even if it was just Mary and Sheldon dicking around, needed to be resolved quickly and cleanly. Otherwise (and he could just hear that sanctimonious weasel of an archbishop saying so) it would reflect…poorly…on his leadership capabilities.

  Well, screw that. Time to go deal with the situation, whatever it was.

  “Right. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Either to find what’s left of Sheldon and Mary, or kick their asses for dicking around on the clock. If they’re okay, that’s great and we do mop-up. If Scaz saw something real this time, then you actually get your hands soiled.” Adele had a reputation for letting everyone else do her dirty work, and MacEllen liked calling her on the issue. He didn’t want her to get crispy-fried quite yet—she was too damn useful and he could get what he wanted out of her with a minimum of flak—but he’d be perfectly happy to see her have to charge in and mix it up with some bruiser, and get her pretty little ass handed to her in the process. She was just a little too satisfied with her self-appointed position on the fringes of things. She needed to learn that no one was safe, and that her prissy little act wasn’t going to play here.

  “Whatever.” Adele was clearly pissed off, and that suited MacEllen just fine. They trotted west, toward the lake and the trouble spot on the map. “So what’s your brilliant plan, assuming this guy is real? Or do we just rush in, screaming, and hope that Scaz was snacking on winos again?”

  “It’s simple. You attract his attention. I pop behind him and kill him. Flame-throwers are bulky as all hell, an
d there’s no way he can turn fast enough to fry both of us. Any other stupid questions?”

  Adele stopped in the middle of the street. “Yeah. What happens if he gets to me before you get him?” MacEllen never broke stride and didn’t even look back at her. “Then you duck.” As she spouted a stream of curses at him, he just laughed and kept going.

  Friday, 13 August 1999, 2:15 AM

  Intersection of Scott and Washington Streets

  Buffalo, New York

  Talley had decided that he loathed Buffalo approximately two minutes after setting foot in the place. It reminded him unpleasantly of some of the Midlands cities, plain girls trying to tart themselves up for tourists by hiding all their dirt and grime.

  MacEllen had no idea that he was there, of course. Letting the angry vampire know that someone was watching him would make him utterly unmanageable. So the templar had merely shadowed the operation, observing MacEllen’s tactics, lending a small incognito assist on occasion while waiting for Lucita to show herself. Talley couldn’t imagine anyone else on the attack squad besides MacEllen who Lucita could be interested in.

  On the whole, Talley decided, MacEllen’s work tonight had been brutal if uninspired. It wouldn’t win him much recognition from those higher up, but on the other hand it was damn difficult to argue with success.

  Now MacEllen was pelting off somewhere personal, trailed by his weed of an assistant. With a curious frown, Talley thought about making his presence known, but decided against it and instead walked from shadow to shadow in their wake. Neither looked back, so he went unobserved. Finally, they turned a corner and left him behind for a second, which for no accountable reason filled Talley with alarm.

  Something painfully stupid was about to happen, he was certain of it. Either something had gone unexpectedly wrong or, more likely, MacEllen had decided that he needed to make a big show of how much he was doing personally to win this fight.

  Abruptly, the night was interrupted by a scream, and a faint whooshing sound that made the hair on Talley’s neck stand on end. He could hear MacEllen cursing, and then the sound of gunfire. The screaming, however, continued.

  Stepping up his pace, Talley headed for the source of the noise. This might be just what—and who—he was waiting for.

  Friday, 13 August 1999, 2:19 AM

  Intersection of Hamburg and South Park Streets

  Buffalo, New York

  Dustin was hot under the collar, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing for a Kindred toting around several gallons of diesel fuel on his back. After he’d toasted the two goons who’d been looking for him, Dustin had gone looking for more fun, but none was to be had. All of the tissue-paper troops that Lladislas had commissioned had been stomped flat by this point. He’d seen some of the corpses of the ones Phoebe had made, and he didn’t have high hopes for the Brujah he’d heard were to the north and west.

  He checked his watch. It had been four hours since the assault began, and as near as he could tell, he was the only one of Buffalo’s defenders still on his feet. Logic dictated that he get the hell out of town, meet up with Tomasz in Syracuse, tell Phoebe some comforting lies about her childer having fought well, and then move on. Those were his marching orders, and he’d seen enough to know that there was something fishy going on. From the briefing Tomasz had given him, Dustin had expected dozens, if not hundreds of opponents—war ghouls thundering down the street, packs of hunting antitribu flushing out havens and setting buildings on fire, chaos in the streets— and he’d intended to use the plant sprayer only as a last resort to get him out of a tight spot.

  Instead, he’d seen about a dozen invaders, total. Clearly, someone had monkeyed things up somewhere along the way. Nothing jibed, and while it wasn’t his job to figure it out, Dustin had a sneaking suspicion that it was his job to get that information to someone who could put two plus two together and get something other than “math is hard.”

  Dustin looked around. In the distance he could see the smoke from multiple fires rising into the night sky. Sirens whined from every corner of the city. A shotgun barked, once, well off to the northeast. The fight was clearly over. It was time to go.

  “Right, one last check on those two to make sure that they’re most sincerely dead, and then I’m blowing town.” The night refused to comment on his witticism, and Dustin sighed. He pondered ducking down into the sewers for safer travel, but decided against it. He figured he’d spend more time moving the fricking manhole cover at each end of the route than he’d save by taking the quote-unquote shortcut. Besides, it was damn difficult to lift up a massive slab of metal in the middle of the street discreetly and quietly.

  With that in mind, he simply closed his eyes for a second and imagined himself to be invisible, then started pacing down the street past the abandoned cars (and one extremely incongruous black sports car that had no damn business being in this neighborhood without being up on blocks). Tomasz claimed to use a different technique for vanishing, but this was what worked for Dustin. Mind you, vanishing didn’t make him feel any different, but he could see its effects on the world around him, and he liked it.

  He especially liked it when vanishing gave him a way to get the drop on dickweeds like the pair of hunter-gatherer types he’d flambeed a few hours back.

  Grinning and self-satisfied, Dustin turned the corner to the place he’d left the smoldering forms his victims. Unfortunately, there was someone already there.

  She was slender and scarred, with long black hair and a headset receiver on. She wore black, of course, and had a face that clearly said “here is a woman who has been pissed 24/7 since the day she was born.” She was squatting by a pile of blackened flesh that Dustin immediately recognized as one of his victims, and she was calling out to someone who was out there but not showing himself.

  Dustin wondered if he was up against a fellow Nosferatu, and remembered any number of clichés about the better part of valor. Besides, if he waited a minute, the vampire in the street’s partner might get tired of her screeching and show up just to shut her up.

  He had no such luck, however, and after an eternal minute or two, he began walking toward the woman. She was clearly one of the enemy, and clearly about as bright as a sack of sand. Even better, there was no sign of her buddy, which meant that he could toast her and get out with no one the wiser.

  The other option, of course, was that her buddy knew he was coming and was hiding, waiting for Dustin to show himself. It, and variants thereof, were basic Nosferatu strategy, but that was unlife in the big city. He decided to risk it. She was standing now, still cursing the air. Dustin moved in and flicked the sprayer nozzle into position. The woman was completely oblivious. She had no idea he was there. He brought up the lighter and took a last look around for his other prey. There was not a soul on the street. Grinning, he dropped his shroud of invisibility—too excited to concentrate anymore—and let the flames roar into life.

  Friday, 13 August 1999, 2:23 AM

  Baltimore Street

  Buffalo, New York

  What was left of Mary smoldered in the middle of the street. It might have been still moving, or perhaps that was just the shriveling effect of the fire on the husk of her corpse. Adele spotted her first, spat a curse and ran to her. “MacEllen?” she called, but the ductus had vanished. Not wasting any more time on that chickenshit—who’d clearly run when he saw that he might get hurt, she reflected bitterly—Adele knelt by Mary’s side to get a closer look at what had been done to her. A crunching sound underneath her feet announced that she’d found Sheldon’s remains as well. She looked over Mary’s cadaver with an appraising eye. Her professional assessment was that whatever had hosed her down hadn’t been a flamethrower but wasn’t a bad approximation of one. In other words, they were dealing with a brutal, clever amateur.

  She looked around for her missing ally. “Damn you, MacEllen, get over here. You should see this.” Only silence answered her for a long minute, then she resignedly got to her feet. She sti
ll had the headset on, and decided to call in one or two of the others, just in case the nutjob with the napalm fixation was still around.

  That was when the flames hit her. She threw herself violently to the left, but didn’t quite make it to safety. The fire washed over her right arm and part of her back, and a scream forced itself out of her throat as she fell to the ground. Behind her, she could hear her assailant cursing, his footsteps slapping on the asphalt as he moved in for the kill. She rolled desperately in an attempt to put the flames out, then gave in to sheer animal panic and started howling in earnest.

  “Shut up, you stupid bitch,” Dustin said, then whirled and sprayed a burst of flame in a semi-circular arc behind him. Deep within the shadows cast by an abandoned house, MacEllen let out a roar of inchoate rage and dropped to the ground.

  “Screw you, asshole. I use that trick, you think I’m dumb enough to fall for it?” Dustin was already on the move, fading into invisibility as he went. MacEllen scrabbled for his pistol and let off a few shots in the vicinity of where the Nosferatu had vanished, but hit only brick, glass and metal. Adele, her head wreathed in flame as her long black hair caught and blazed, continued screaming. Her right hand left smoking palm-prints on the asphalt as she crawled toward the end of the block.

  The flames over his head gone, MacEllen climbed to his feet warily. The Nosferatu was still out there somewhere, with a flame-thrower no less, and he needed to be at his best. Adele’s frenzied howling distracted him, so after a second’s deliberation, he put a bullet into her head. She gurgled once and collapsed. Suddenly, the only noise on the street was the soft crackle of the flames eating away at her prone form, mixed with the hiss of burning fat.