“Son of a bitch,” said MacEllen very clearly as he began to circle away from Adele’s remains. His pistol was in his hand, his eyes straining for any sign of his opponent. Briefly, he considered a tactical retreat. He could grab some of the others and come back. With help from someone besides the utterly useless Adele, he could flush the bastard out and put the clamps on him. Then this little operation would be over with and he’d come out of it smelling like a rose—all of Buffalo subjugated in a single night.
As quickly as the notion arose, he dismissed it. There was no way in hell he was going to ask for help. This was his operation, his command, and bringing anyone else in would be setting himself up for a challenge. No, better to handle the risk—and the benefits—solo.
And then there came a sudden sound behind him, and MacEllen knew that he was very, very dead.
Friday, 13 August 1999, 2:25 AM
Baltimore Street
Buffalo, New York
Talley stepped into shadow about forty feet from where Adele was burning. Not far past her, MacEllen was firing randomly into the night. One of the bullets nearly winged Talley, and mentally the templar made another black mark against his estimation of the man’s competence.
Dispassionately, he watched as the thug silenced the screaming Adele. That was simply a waste of resources. Had MacEllen been thinking, he would have attempted to smother the flames in shadow, or found some other way to try to save his reasonably useful second-in-command. But the ductus was lost in his own little fantasy trip at this point, acting from gut instinct rather than reason, and it had cost him.
MacEllen stepped away from the corpse delicately and began a series of spinning maneuvers presumably designed to make sure that no one was getting the drop on him. In actuality, they made him look ridiculous, like a fat man in fatigues missing targets at a rifle range, but Talley didn’t care. He was too busy scanning the street for the author of the carnage.
It took only seconds to locate the Nosferatu with an awkward bulge beneath his coat. Confident in his invisibility, the vampire made no effort to take cover or otherwise protect himself. Instead, he was laughing, and mimicked one or two of MacEllen’s more ridiculous faux-jetées. He seemed to be having a grand old time. Unfortunately for him, Talley was old enough and powerful enough to see through his efforts to veil himself. “You’re never the last link in the chain, lad,” Talley murmured to himself. “If you’d remembered that, you might have gotten out of here.”
Talley was tempted to leave MacEllen to the fate he deserved, but if the Nosferatu took out the ductus, Lucita might never show her face, and the trip north would be wasted.
Talley knelt down and picked up a pebble. It was a shard of cement, perhaps an inch across and with jagged sides. No doubt it had been tom out of a sidewalk somewhere nearby through rough usage or harsh weather, but that was of no importance. Talley looked at it calmly. It would serve.
Out in the street, the Nosferatu had ceased his capering and took careful aim at the nearly spasmodic MacEllen. Another second and the positioning would be perfect, and slowly he turned his back on where Talley stood to follow the gyrations of his target.
Talley tsked. He placed the pebble in the palm of his left hand and squinted, making sure that his aim was true. Lifting his hand, he concentrated for a second and then flicked the pebble right at the center of the Nosferatu’s misshapen back.
The sound the pebble made when it went through the tank might have been mistaken for a gunshot. The sound it made when it exited through the Nosferatu’s stomach was indescribable. The results, however, were easy to discern. The vampire flicked into plain view, clutching his stomach with one hand. He spun, looking for his assailant with an expression of shock on his face, and staggered. Gasoline or something like it made a wet stain on the back of the creature’s coat and dripped to the ground; a bloody mixture poured from between his fingers.
MacEllen finally noticed what happened (seconds too late, Talley noted dispassionately) and turned with a roar. Talley merely stooped and picked up another pebble. In the street, the Nosferatu broke into a stumbling run, trying to shed both his coat and the leaking tank on his back. MacEllen sprinted after him, screaming imprecations.
Talley ignored that and instead took his aim again. He aimed, not at the fugitive, but rather at the cracked asphalt just behind him. The pebble took off with a whoosh, and struck the street precisely where Talley had wanted it to. The impact, as such impacts are wont to, created a spark.
The results were impressive. The flame scurried up the Nosferatu’s coat in a matter of seconds, inspiring a wail of terror and pain. The vampire stumbled on a few more steps, then the flame reached the tank.
What happened was not precisely an explosion. Rather, it was a burst of flame that more or less took off the upper third of the Nosferatu’s body, and sent minuscule bits of the tank whizzing about. MacEllen narrowly avoided getting singed, and flattened himself to the street as the tank went up.
From a safe distance, Talley permitted himself a humorless smile. That quickly vanished as MacEllen pulled himself up and cautiously advanced until he was nearly straddling the still-burning corpse. He kicked it, once, cautiously, and the flaming remnants of what had been an arm flew several feet. MacEllen jumped back, startled, and cursed again, at which point Talley decided that it was time to make his presence known lest his assignment suffer the vampiric equivalent of a burst blood vessel. He stepped out into the yellowish light of the street lamps, and waited for MacEllen to notice him.
“—er just exploded. Never seen anything like that without a Tremere around, never seen anything like it at—what the fuck are you doing here?”
Talley bowed, precisely, from the neck. “Saving you. Against my better judgment.”
“So it was you—”
“Indeed. It was me. Now is the time, Ductus MacEllen, when you stop stammering and thank me.” MacEllen stalked closer. “Son of a bitch. It was you. You were here the whole time.”
Talley nodded. “We’ve already established that. In fact, I have been watching you since the operation began, including tailing you through the steel factory, observing your conversations with your late second-in-command, and so on. I must say I was impressed by the turn of speed you managed in getting here. If you’d moved a little more slowly, I might have been able to protect Adele as well. Incidentally, I think she’s about out. You may want to stamp on her bits to make sure.”
“So you saw everything.” MacEllen took a few more steps, sparing only the briefest of glances for what was left of Adele. “Why are you here? Are you spying on me for Polonia and those assholes? Is that it, you’re here to make me look bad?”
“No, you idiot, Lucita is in this city! Do you want to face her alone?” Talley shifted his weight into a fighting crouch. Impossible as it seemed, it looked as if MacEllen might actually attack him. Whether or not the man had succumbed to his inner demons, he was clearly unhinged and might well decide to try to get rid of any witnesses to his self-assessed humiliation.
MacEllen’s chances of actually hurting Talley were comical, but the situation was sticky enough as it was. So Talley, being the efficient sort of vampire that he was, simply locked eyes with his would-be assailant and extended his will against MacEllen’s. Unsurprisingly, the resistance was minimal.
“Sit,” Talley said, and obediently MacEllen sat where he was. “Behave yourself,” Talley said, suddenly irritated for no reason that he could fathom. MacEllen nodded with pathetic eagerness, and Talley exhaled in disgust. This short-tempered idiot, who clearly couldn’t handle himself in any situation more stressful than a game of darts, was going to get himself killed sooner or later regardless of what Talley did. For a brief instant, he considered handing the man off to Lucita as a bribe not to bother any of the three archbishops. The idea had a certain appeal, he had to confess.
He turned back to MacEllen in disgust, prepared to frog-march the man back to the putative field HQ, when suddenly, everythin
g became very, very dark.
Friday, 13 August 1999, 2:28 AM
Baltimore Street
Buffalo, New York
Lucita had observed the entire affair from a rooftop across from where MacEllen now squatted in the street. She’d watched it with some amusement—the whole chain of Kindred, each convinced that he was both invisible and invincible, made for a certain sort of low comedy. She’d seen vampires hunting vampires before, but the combination of factors—the bizarre little Nosferatu’s choice of weapon, the blustering swagger and cowardice of MacEllen, Talley’s nonchalant approach to the problem—all combined into something profoundly risible even as it was terrible.
Seeing Talley had surprised her at first. She’d received word from her first employer that the Hound had been imported. Rumor had it that her own sire had sent the man to safeguard his beloved archbishops. But Talley being in Buffalo, while the archbishops were presumably safe elsewhere, didn’t make sense.
Unless he was after her.
The thought caused Lucita some concern. Talley’s presence was an unexpected complication. The Hound was good, very good, and would change her plans for dealing with her target. MacEllen himself was nothing. He’d nearly been taken out by the childe with the flamethrower, and clearly was well below Lucita’s level in terms of talent, power and intelligence. But Talley was a different matter, a very powerful and determined one.
Lucita had crossed paths with the Hound once before, some eighty years prior in New York City. She’d been there on pleasure while he was on business; they’d intersected in the notorious Five Points. Talley had been sent by Monçada to rid the city of a troublesome vampire named Karl who’d been noisily disrupting certain of the archbishop’s long-range plans. Unfortunately, Karl was also the Kindred responsible for much of Lucita’s amusement at the time, and she took exception to the attempt to remove him before she was finished. The duel had been long and bloody, sparking a brawl in the tenements and speakeasies to rival the infamous Dead Rabbit Riots. At the heart of it, the two ancient children of shadow had torn at each other with unimaginable fury, cloaking an entire city block in impenetrable darkness. The newspaper reports talked of broken power lines as an explanation, but in truth, it had been Lucita and Talley hunting each other in the dark, fueling themselves with the lives of the hundreds trapped within their battlefield.
Lucita had won, barely. Karl had been wounded but slipped away during the fury of her counterattack. She’d later learned that he’d fled the country, and had been destroyed by Talley in Vancouver, in 1934. By that time, of course, she’d long since ceased to care. Talley himself had left the scene exhausted but relatively unscathed, leaving her with a mocking bow and an expression of regards for her sire. And she had stumbled out of the tenements, weary but more or less triumphant, and thoroughly convinced that Talley was, if not her equal, then at least one of the more frightening opponents she’d ever faced.
And now here he was across the street, muttering to himself. No doubt his professional sensibilities had been thoroughly offended by MacEllen’s performance. No doubt he was just the slightest bit irritated, and that meant that he was the slightest bit distracted, and that meant that if she moved very quickly, everything would work out just fine.
She reached out, across the street, to the shadows that so recently had hidden Talley himself. They responded to her call, eagerly shaping themselves into ropy arms that stretched forth to envelope the templar. Talley, to his credit, did not hesitate, but rather ducked and rolled to his left, out into the street. One shadow tentacle did grasp his arm as he moved, but with practiced ease he simply tore it to shreds. Lucita smiled and sent more tendrils of blackness after him. The idea was not to kill Talley, or even to wound him, but rather to keep him off balance and drive him further and further from the still-dazed MacEllen. Then, when it was too late, she’d simply terminate her target and stop harassing the templar, leaving without any fuss.
Of course, that plan relied on keeping Talley on the defensive, and that was going to take everything she had. She frowned, and another tentacle of shadow burst forth from beneath a manhole cover in the middle of the street. The metal disc went thirty feet in the air and nearly caught Talley on the way down, even as he dodged of the way of his new assailant. Slowly but surely, he was moving into the middle of the street, which was blanketed in illumination from multiple streetlamps. Lucita’s shadows stretched themselves thin to reach Talley here, and he avoided them with ease.
“Lucita,” he called out, glancing about in an attempt to pinpoint the attack. “Good to see you again! Your sire asked about you, in case you were wondering.” He ducked another swipe, then drew on shadow himself and tore Lucita’s servant to shreds. “He mentioned you might be in the States; so glad to see he was right!”
Lucita cursed and called up more shadows from the now-open manhole. They geysered upwards, then plunged down on Talley like a hammer of night. The templar sidestepped, and the shadows’ impact on the street cracked the asphalt with a sound like thunder.
“Lucita, you’re not going to get me like that! Come on out, so we can talk. At the very least, you owe me a rematch!” All the while he dodged and struck, called forth shadow tendrils of his own and moved with a laughing grace that was hypnotically smooth. Huge clubs of darkness smashed the surface of the street, leaving enormous holes and sending debris flying everywhere. In the middle of the carnage, Talley laughed, and Lucita saw for the first time the pure, unadulterated joy the man took in his work.
It was as good a cue as any to finish matters. She called forth a last arm of darkness and brought it screaming down toward where Talley stood. He avoided it easily, and she split it into three smaller entities. Two continued to pursue Talley, while the third arrowed straight for where MacEllen still sat, oblivious.
Talley saw what was happening and desperately summoned shadows of his own in a vain attempt to deflect Lucita’s. Even as he did so, the first two tendrils struck him like hammer blows. He cried out, the first time Lucita had ever heard him do so, and his control of his shadows faltered.
As Talley fell, Lucita’s last shadow tendril reached MacEllen, wrapped around his neck, and with ungentle pressure, tore his head off. There was silence for a moment, and then the pack ductus’s body toppled to the street with a barely audible thump. Blood pumped from his neck into the gutter, pooling amidst the trash and dead leaves. His head came to rest a few feet away, face down.
Talley slowly and silently picked himself up as the arms of shadow that both vampires had created dissipated into nothingness. Lucita dusted herself off and took two steps back from the ledge, acutely aware that she was dangerously low on blood should Talley decide to continue their disagreement.
“Lucita,” he called, in a more reasonable tone of voice. “Nicely done, my gracious senorita. I’ll be on the lookout for that in the future. It seems that this time you are the hunter, and I the protector. I think it only professional courtesy that I advise you to let it end with this one.” He gestured toward MacEllen. “Otherwise, I—and your sire—will be greatly displeased.”
With that, he executed a sketchy bow and walked off. Lucita debated following him, but the gnawing hunger in her stomach told her that it would be foolish, if not suicidal. Instead, she went down the cast-iron fire escape at the back of the building she stood on and loped the three blocks to where she’d parked. Ideally, she’d find someone to eat on the way out of town, hole up somewhere in secure Camarilla territory, and relax in order to plan the next job.
She came out of the alley she’d entered across the street from her car. Wonder of wonders, it was still there. Even more miraculously, the tires had not been slashed. She climbed in and started the engine; it responded with a warm purr.
Some nights, she reflected, things actually did all go your way. It was unfortunate that the city was doomed anyway, but in the end, that wasn’t really her concern.
With a smile, she slammed the car into gear and roared off into
what was left of the night.
Friday, 13 August 1999, 5:18 AM
U.S. Steel Plant
Buffalo, New York
Talley stood in front of the abandoned steel plant. It would serve as well as anyplace for a temporary haven. The survivors of the assault had straggled back over the past several hours. They were mostly upbeat; they’d crushed the pitiful resistance Buffalo had offered. A couple of the ghouls had bullet wounds, but mostly everyone was unscathed. They laughed and joked and told stories about how they’d dispatched various of the idiots sent against them. If anyone missed Sheldon or Mary, or even Adele or MacEllen, it wasn’t evident from what Talley heard. The troops were just happy the fight was over and that they’d kicked ass.
All in all, he found it hard to disagree with them.
As the last of the survivors entered the building, Talley gazed out at the streets. The charred corpses had been unceremoniously hurled in dumpsters. Fires and vampire-initiated firefights had distracted the police and other mortal annoyances sufficiently that there had been no interference with their efforts.
As for MacEllen, he was no great loss as far as Talley was concerned. The trip north had been about as successful as he’d expected it to be. He’d warned Lucita. If she failed to abide by his advice…well, he’d have no compunction in dealing harshly with her the next time they met.
Having accomplished that intermediate goal, Talley was ready to return to Washington and direct his attention to the question that, to Monçada, was more pressing even than the personal well-being of the archbishops: Who had hired Lucita?
Clan Novel Lasombra: Book 6 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 13