by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
She could hear him clamber through the window after her, his motions making a flapping noise like the beating wings of a mighty bird, an eagle. A vulture.
But she had a head start. With a leap, Tessa was on the next roof, and then another one. She wanted as much distance between herself and the very angry, very injured James as possible. She needed time to think.
A drug nicknamed Shanghai Red had arrived in Manhattan.
Lily was gone.
Two vampires had come to find her.
Feeling herself further tangled in a spider’s web she didn’t yet understand, she knew there was but one place to go for answers.
Underground.
Chapter 10
The night air rushed past Tessa as she hurried as fast as she could down to Grand Central Station. Lying over subway grates, Manhattan’s homeless struggled to keep warm. Cops clustered in groups of two, some with German shepherds, part of the increased security after 9/11.
All in all, she found the extremities of Grand Central misery-inducing. The atrium was beautiful, almost like a cathedral, but deeper into the catacombs of tunnels, the air smelled of urine and the unkempt and dirty, as well as exhaust fumes and steamy grime. She rushed past leering men, a prostitute or two, and listened to the droning voice of someone announcing train arrivals over the P.A. system. Tessa walked quickly, making her way on to a track in the farthest reaches of the station. But her destination was still farther, to a place few even knew existed.
Slipping onto the tracks, she looked at her watch. No one was around, and she walked up the tracks to a series of tunnels. The slightest vibrations of the tracks told her which path to take, and she moved along past rats and trash until she came to an area of catacombs leading to still more tunnels and switchbacks. From there, she slipped into one particular tunnel, grateful for the eyes of the undead, able to pierce through darkness.
After walking for ten minutes, she heard hissing and whispering, and she knew she was near the encampment of King. A small fire burned in a trash can, and she could see the outlined figures of three men. One of them whirled around as she approached.
“What the f—” he muttered, his hair was matted and greasy, his face filthy, almost black with grime, making him almost unrecognizable as human.
“I’m here to see King,” she said, widening her stance, ready to pounce, to fight, or to defend.
“Who’s you?” the man challenged her. She smelled alcohol on his breath.
“Tessa. He knows who I am.”
“Wait here.” She saw his eyes narrow untrustingly in the faint glow of the fire. Then he moved further back into the manmade caves of the tunnel. Every nerve of Tessa’s was alive as she waited. She knew, watching her, unseen, were all of King’s “children,” the lost souls he protected who worshipped him as an underground deity. They’d kill for him. She’d even heard rumors of cannibalism.
Finally, after waiting uneasily, she was summoned.
“King will see you now.” The wild-eyed man came close to her and sniffed at her. “You smell like the undead.”
“So do you,” she sneered. She couldn’t let him see her unnerved. Not for a minute could she show weakness. Not down here. Not now.
She followed the man back into the tunnels. She passed makeshift campsites strewn with old newspapers and litter, not much more than refrigerator boxes and clotheslines with dirty blankets thrown over them. Mattresses and chairs, the stuffing falling out of them, were strewn about, and people clustered in small, familial groups. Shockingly, she even heard the wails of children. She saw an old shopping cart being used as a crib, a small, dirt-covered baby inside it. This was King’s city.
Finally, she stood in front of King. His throne was constructed of cinder blocks, and then covered in tinfoil. Oddly enough, despite being thrown together from trash and construction debris, it glinted in the firelight. And there sat King, his long grey hair nearly to his waist, his face covered in grime, yet his eyes a youthful blue. Tessa never could figure out his age.
“King.” She bowed, placing her two palms together as she did so, a gesture of peace.
“Tessa…” He nodded.
“I don’t have time for niceties, King. I come in peace. You know that. You know me.”
“Ah, yes. The Buddhist. Avoid intoxication. Refrain from false speech. Avoid sexual misconduct. You do all the things a good Buddhist does. Except that one little precept: Avoid taking lives. You undead filth.”
She clenched her jaw. She didn’t have time to defend her principles, her existence, not to King. Not right now. “You know my story, King. You’ve always known. It’s probably in that book of yours.”
He nodded. King was a vampire hunter. He was as crazy as anyone in Bellevue—from where he had escaped once. But he was also sane enough to wage a true war on the undead. He once had a wife, once had a daughter, but he had lost them to two vampires. At least that was the story he told his followers.
King used to be Brian Harper. He was driving somewhere out in the deserts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, living the hippie life, dropping acid, listening to the music of peaceful protest. He created Native American musical instruments, and he sold them at craft fairs throughout the West, traveling with his wife, Estella, and little girl, Chiara, in a run-down Chevrolet van.
They called the van Ethel, and “she” was stocked with all a man, woman and little girl could need—a small refrigerator to keep milk and cold drinks in, a bed, their clothes, food, even a little porta-potty. Brian did most of the driving, and Estella and Chiara’s job was to sing and keep him awake.
One night, Brian and his family had the misfortune to break down in the middle of the desert near sundown.
“What’s wrong with Ethel?” Chiara asked.
“Poor Ethel is a little sick, is all. I’ll get out and see if I can’t fix her.”
Brian worked with a flashlight and a few tools, and tried to see what the problem was. In the end, he concluded there was a very good reason he failed automechanics in high school. He had no idea what was wrong with his van.
Climbing back in the driver’s seat, he said, “Ethel has a virus. We’re gonna have to spend the night out here, Chiara. And wait for someone to come along in the morning.”
“Is this an adventure?” Chiara asked, her blue eyes so like his own.
“Sure is, honeybun.”
As night fell, they heard a keening, a wailing.
“What’s that?” Estella asked.
He rubbed her shoulder. “It’s nothing honey. Probably some desert coyote. You know…it’s getting chilly. Let’s roll up the windows just in case, climb in back and just get a good night’s sleep. Some truckers are bound to pass us in the morning.”
He turned to roll up his window, and Estella reached over to roll up hers. Chiara was in between them. Then, from seemingly nowhere, two vampires descended, reaching in through the open window on Estella’s side of the van and plucking his wife and child like a pair of rag dolls out through the window. Inexplicably, they left King to scream out in the night.
He jumped out of the van and called for his wife and child until he was hoarse, then voiceless. At first, he could hear Chiara’s screams. Then nothing.
Taking a flashlight, he began to walk to where he had last heard a scream. Eventually, he seemed to know they were dead. He collapsed in the sand, where he lay, barely coherent, until morning.
When the sun came up, he shuddered awake, wondering if it had all been a nightmare. But then he stood and saw, not too far off, two bodies lying sprawled on the desert floor. He ran to them. His wife and child stared up at the sun, unseeing, vampire bites on their necks, much of their blood drained. They weren’t “turned”—in the way vampires can create new vampires—they were drained to skin on skeleton. Dead.
He already had no voice, having screamed himself mute. He cried silently, clutching them to his chest, rocking, crying.
He trudged back to the van and returned to their bodies with a makeshift
shovel—the lid of their cooler. He dug shallow graves and buried them in the desert. Brian had once, when he was a teen, been arrested for assault. He’d served time for breaking and entering when he was nineteen. No policeman would believe his story of depraved vampires. He told no one—and went mad. He had no idea how many months he lost to drugs and alcohol. Finally, he woke up in a state psychiatric hospital—sobered up. And in part madness, part despair, he decided to become a vampire hunter.
Perhaps the two vampires had spared him out of a sense of cruelty. They would leave him to grieve. That had been their mistake. Because King, after burying his wife and child, the horror of having heard their last cries echoing through his head, after his months of insanity, had decided he wouldn’t rest until every vampire on earth was dead. He set about discovering all there was to know about vampires. He traveled the country taking odd jobs and took all the money he had and even went hunting in Europe, reading in musty manuscripts about different legacies of different vampires from the Dark Ages to the present time. He chased down half truths and small leads, and he learned to kill them, and he kept all his kills and clues and legends in a book he called The Bible.
Now, he ruled over a small band of society’s outcasts. And he and Tessa had an uneasy truce worked out years before, after her arrival in Manhattan. She had proved to him that she was on a mission herself, to rid the world of a different scourge.
“My friend Lily is missing.”
He nodded, not reacting.
“And there’s a sudden spike in the vampire population in the city of Manhattan, all of whom seem to want me dead.”
“And how do you think I can help you?” He spread his palms out, mocking her with a look of wide-eyed curiosity.
“My guess is, King, you already knew about the sudden escalation in the vampire population. Nothing escapes your eyes.” She looked around, knowing from the darkness she was being watched by the eyes of King’s people. His unseen spies. They were the homeless that people stepped over and didn’t really see.
“Don’t try to flatter me,” he spat.
“I’m not. That’s the truth…and my guess is you may even know where Lily is. I’m going to get her back, and I don’t care who I have to kill to do it. We can either work on the same side, as we have in the past, or we can declare an end to our truce. But I am going to find her.”
Tessa stared at King and willed him to help her. She wanted to rub at her temples, which throbbed, but she didn’t want him to see how badly she needed to feed.
“They’re European.”
“Who?”
“The band of vampires who arrived here. Lineage goes back to Italy. Back to him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Your sire. Yours and Lily’s. It’s all related somehow. By taking Lily, I presume they’re trying to lure you out into the light of day—or at least into the battleground of darkness.”
“Do you have any idea where Lily is?”
He shook his head.
“You know she started out as a servant. She had no desire for immortality.”
He nodded. “I’ll keep my ears to the ground.”
“Thank you, King.”
“And in return…”
“I know.” Tessa bowed to him. In exchange for his help was the agreement that any news on Marco would be relayed to him. King had only killed one of the two vampires who destroyed his wife and child. He had tracked down a vampire by the name of Damien, whose origins spanned back to Romania. The second one, her own sire, had remained elusive for the thirty years King had been hunting. And King wouldn’t stop until he succeeded in killing Marco. Though rumors persisted that Marco had died in a fire, Tessa never knew what to believe. She needed the truce with King, and so she had promised to share with him any news about Marco’s rumored whereabouts.
Tessa turned on her heel and made her way back through the catacombs and caves. The acrid smell of unwashed human flesh and urine assaulted her nostrils. Finally, she emerged from the bowels of Grand Central Station and into the night air of Manhattan. She needed to feed, and made her way down to an open air drug market on the Hudson River. She and Lily often came here, usually stumbling on dealers with AK-47s and posses of killers. She would find prey here.
“Lily,” she whispered, as she stood on the shore, the wind whipping her hair around her face. “Hang on.” Then she turned in the direction of the glow of crack pipes.
Chapter 11
Tony Flynn slept fitfully.
And he woke up with a raging hard-on. Christ, he thought, what am I? Fourteen?
But there it was, the hard-on, taunting him. Because no matter how much he tried to deny it to Alex Williams, Flynn knew Tessa Van Doren occupied his dreams almost as much as she occupied his waking thoughts.
He stretched and shook his head in disbelief. Yup. Like he was fucking fourteen.
Finally, the hard-on subsided, and he rolled over and climbed out of bed and hit the shower. A cold one. After showering, he shaved. Then he ran a comb through his hair—though he knew it was as unruly as his dick. Finally, he went out into his kitchen and started the coffeemaker.
His ex-wife had let him keep the coffeemaker.
He could never get over how calculated their separation was. Whereas he would curl himself into a ball at night, agonizing over what went wrong, Diana had moved out and into the Park Avenue pad of the dermatologist she was servicing on the side. Then she’d returned to their shabby apartment with a goddamn clipboard on which she had itemized every one of their possessions. And she’d proceeded to keep everything of value. In the end, all Tony Flynn had asked for was the coffeemaker.
He took his coffee black, and breakfast was often a microwaved hot dog or leftover pizza. This morning, it was the vestiges of moo goo gai pan. He shook his head. How could Tessa Van Doren’s world intermingle with his? He dug into the moo goo gai pan in the white takeout box with a fork that had a bent tine, washing his breakfast down with coffee in a mug with a chip in it. He imagined Tessa taking her coffee out of fine bone china and a sterling coffeepot.
Midbite, his cell phone rang. He pressed Talk. “Flynn.”
“Tony, my boy, it’s Gus.”
“Hey Gus…what’s up?”
“I think you should come by after work if you can. I have something to show you.”
“Yeah?” Flynn raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t want to say anything more. Consider it a surprise.”
“Okay, Gus. I’ll be by around seven. You gonna be there?”
“Eh, Tony…where am I gonna go? Think I got an invitation to dinner with the mayor? I’ll make us some kielbasa with a nice rye from the bakery up the street. How does that sound?”
Tony looked down at his ice-cold moo goo gai pan. “Better than you know, Gus. Better than you know.”
At ten minutes after seven, Tony Flynn got off the train in Queens with a crowd of commuters and walked three blocks to Gus’s place. He could smell the kielbasa out in the hallway, and his mouth watered.
“Tony!” Gus opened the door and enveloped him in a bear hug.
“Hey, Gus.” Flynn smiled and patted his friend’s back. He walked into the apartment, where the small table was set for two. It was dinner—so that meant Gus put out a tablecloth. The television was tuned to a sports channel with the volume all the way down.
“Sit down.”
Flynn did, and immediately saw a brown envelope on his plate.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.” Gus looked very excited.
Flynn cautiously opened the envelope and slid out a black-and-white picture. In it, five S.S. officers smiled at a camera in a nightclub, their ominous uniforms crisp-looking, their grins somewhat dangerous-looking. And there, in the corner of the picture, was a beautiful woman with dark hair, her face in profile and one hand raised to her face, as if to block the camera shot. Even blurry, she looked like Tessa’s twin, and his stomach tightened.
“Holy shit.”
“Yes. The Night Flight Club in Germany. It’s a copy of the original picture. And that one—” Gus pointed at the man second from the left “—is Goebbels. That’s why I couldn’t find it in my files. I had it in his file.”
“And her?” Flynn pointed to the woman.
“She was the proprietress. A contessa. Mysterious. No one was sure of her exact background. European. But not German. Not Aryan, certainly, by the looks of her. But she ran a hot spot where the S.S. liked to play, and so she was tolerated.”
“A contessa, you say?” Flynn whispered.
“Yes. And that’s not all. There was supposedly an explosion. An assassination attempt. Place blown up when it was filled with German officers.”
“Including Goebbels.”
Gus nodded. “He escaped, but whoever planted the bomb got more than a few S.S. Now you understand some of this isn’t substantiated. Rumors. Rumors passed down amongst World War II buffs.”
Flynn ran his finger over the picture. “What happened to her? After the war?”
Gus shrugged. “No one knows. It’s as if she vanished into thin air. She could have died in the explosion. It wasn’t like there was DNA testing back then. Even if she didn’t die, it was common to lose track of people after the war—the world was insane then. So not knowing what happened to her isn’t surprising in and of itself.”
“She looks like someone I know.”
“This woman? Does she look like the one who runs the club?”
Flynn nodded. “They could be twins.”
“Maybe this was her grandmother or something.”
“Maybe.” Flynn shook his head back and forth while Gus stood and brought in a platter of kielbasa.
“Well, it’s not like it could be her.”
“Huh?” Flynn was distracted.
“I said, it’s not like it could be her.”