by J. F. Lewis
JPC knelt over the gun and tried to pick it up as well, drawing back sharply as if it burned him, too. He took off his coat and wrapped it around the Colt.
“Git yore sister if’n you want her, and let’s skedaddle!” the ghost shouted. “I ain’t never seen Perdy do this afore. I ain’t shore whut’s goin’ ter happen, but it might not be pretty.”
I lifted Rachel off the pile of broken bottles and she winced, shards of glass poking out of her back. She sagged back to human as if she’d barely managed the uber vamp energy she’d used.
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“I’ll walk away from him,” Rachel answered. She tried to stand and leaned against me hard. “My healing’s not as spiffy when Eric’s this far away. Shit. Transforming saved my life, but it used up all my uber juice.”
La Bête’s laughter grew, and so did the light show. When I looked back, it reminded me of the scene in Predator (one of the many sci-fi movies I’d sat through just to spend time with my dad) where the Governator realizes the alien is going to nuke itself.
“Run! Dang it all! Run!” John Paul shouted, clutching the smoldering bundle he’d made from El Alma Perdida to his chest. “He may be dying. He may not be, but whatever he’s doing, I think it’s going be about as fun for onlookers as a front row seat at a volcanic eruption.”
“But it’s sunlight outside!”
“Turn into something portable,” Rachel said. “But not a cat.”
“I’ll probably pass out when I do.”
“I’ll get you out of here, Tabitha.”
“You need to go to Orly,” I told her. “It’s where Phillip’s private plane is waiting for us. Can you find it?”
“I’ll find it.”
“Can I trust you?” I asked.
“You don’t have to trust me,” Rachel said, venom creeping into her voice. “Eric ordered me to help you. It’s a command and he’s my master. I can’t go against him when he’s made it an order. Trying to defy orders will just make me age.”
“I can do a sparrow,” I offered.
“Take off your coat first,” Rachel instructed.
“Why?”
“Because blood-covered women attract the wrong sort of attention!”
I gave her the coat and transformed into a bird. She stuffed me into a coat pocket and ran. As we took the elevator up and the doors opened, I heard the crash of thunder under a cloudless sky. The ground shook. I had just enough time to wonder if John Paul Courtney was okay—if a ghost could even be hurt—before the sleep of the dead claimed me. Whether la Bête was coming after us or I’d heard the sound of his explosive demise, I wouldn’t know till nightfall. By then, we’d either have made it or not.
49
ERIC:
DESTROY ALL MONSTERS
You’re too late. Words. That’s all they were: words in my head. And whether they were mine or Scrythax’s or even Rachel’s, I’ll never know. Too late. A litany of failure hammered nails in through my skull.
Too late.
Too slow.
Too stupid.
And you deserve it. So did she. That one was definitely not mine.
“I’m not done yet.” My voice echoed, a stereophonic halo of sound leaving my lips and Fang’s speakers. I climbed out from behind the wheel and stepped over the windshield and out onto the hood. Akira Ifukube music blared, Godzilla vs. Mothra, and we rolled back from the front doors of the Highland Towers.
A scream of rage. The roar of a V-8 engine. Two bodies—one metal and one organic—charged forward as one. All of the magic in the area winked into view, revealing the soul-spangled web of protection surrounding the building: werewolf souls and a tiny piece of Scrythax all tied together and put to ill use. We clashed against it, Fang and I. There was no need for the uber vamp, not yet. My eyes burned violet, infecting the shield with incandescent fury.
Phillip popped into my mind, clinging to the legs of another vampire, Percy, the one I’d always seen in the glass case.
“Help me,” Phillip begged Percy.
“Nomen est omen,” Percy whispered. “Names are destiny. Yours means ‘lover of horses,’ and his”—the bespectacled vampire looked at me—“his means ‘all powerful.’”
A sense of Percy bounced against the wave of my psyche. He was powerful, an Emperor like me, and old—from an age of chamber music I didn’t recognize. Percy’d been around for centuries . . . at least. One more Emperor to add to my hit parade.
“Sorry about all this,” Percy thought at me. “He’s controlling the wards, and I fear he’s gone and activated his failsafe. No one can get in or out.” He faded before I got out a reply.
The wards will tear you apart! That time it was definitely Scrythax.
“So what?” Fang and I rolled backward once more, the magic shield sliding with us, drawn by the purple fire in my eyes. “It doesn’t take all that much to put my dead ass back together again.”
On our next charge, the shield cracked and so did my jaw. Shards of magic sliced me to ribbons like paper through a shredder, but Fang kept rolling until his front end knocked the front doors down. I slid off the hood in a mass, re-forming legs first as he stopped. Almost formless, I kept moving, a mass of writhing reincorporating flesh, all sliding back together into the shape of one very angry vampire.
Thralls, some belonging to Phillip, others not, rushed out to meet me, weapons in hand. A man thrust a stake into my chest and the stake exploded, taking his hand off and splintering him with slivers. Spirals of blue protective magic formed around me as the wards thrust me back out into the street, still crackling with bursts of electricity.
Wings of tenebrous leather tore through my T-shirt, and my fangs and claws became disproportionate to my size as I turned into the uber vamp. My claws, normally black like my uber-vamp skin, were edged in gold, my body larger than before, a good eleven feet, maybe twelve.
“Little pig, little pig,” I roared.
“We defend the masters,” a young man with dark hair shouted. The flamethrower in his hand shook, the fear-tremble uncontrollable.
He cut loose with the flames, but I didn’t move. Fire lit my skin, tracing my muscles like red orange highlighter, and didn’t burn me so much as illuminate me—more Balrog in appearance than vampire.
“Let me in!”
The thralls faltered as one. Retreated. Bats covered the moon. Rats poured out of the sewers. But when they touched the protective ward, they burned.
Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in . . .
“Hmmm.”
Buildings like the Highland Towers, built between the turn of the century and the start of World War II, were already using steel construction. Before steel they’d been using massive iron columns with load-bearing walls. The Highland Towers’ more modern construction was problematic. Modern buildings are sturdier, the weight well distributed . . . but maybe . . .
Anticipating my command, Fang zoomed off, looped the block, and came back at top speed, plowing into the northeast corner at more than a hundred miles an hour. Shards of stone facing filled the air, and when the wards bounced him back, Fang was already regenerating. I’d seen him do it before, but he did it faster now, healing as quickly as me.
The exterior facing broke free, but the concrete underneath it was only cracked. Fang revved his engine and began to make another pass, but I shook my head. I needed something bigger than my car to break these wards, something so epic that they couldn’t just hurl it back out . . .
“Something”—my eyes raked the building—“really”—I looked at a manhole cover in the middle of the street—“massive.”
I wonder . . .
What are you doing, Eric? Scrythax asked, his voice high-pitched and singsongy.
Tearing the cover off a manhole is easy. Fitting an uber vamp–sized body down one isn’t. Void City’s sewer system is huge—not Paris huge, but still big. Punching an uber vamp–sized hole through the street isn’t easy, but if you have a s
turdy metal tool, say a manhole cover, and you have a tremendous amount of supernatural brawn, you can get the job done.
I kept waiting to hear sirens, to have Captain Stacey and his goons from the VCPD show up to mess with my day, but they didn’t. Hacking and chopping, I broke through the road, turning the sewage tunnel into an open trench. Once inside the trench, the going wasn’t any easier, but determination, rage, and the need to kill kept me focused. Pain from the bones of my hands breaking and reknitting with each blow gave me something to keep me company while I worked and waited.
Eric? What are you doing, Eric?
Character, I quoted, is like the foundation of a house—it’s below the surface.
Excuse me?
“You’re being dense, Horn Head.” I stopped working and closed my eyes, trying to reach for the power I needed. “Try this one by Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and . . .’” I couldn’t think of the rest of the quote. “And I am going to knock this goddamn building down and see what Phil’s motherfucking wards have to say about it!”
The speed came. It came in a steady flood from Fang to me and, through me, to all the creepy-crawly things I could hurl at the ground and at the concrete, at the brick, and at the stone. The power came too. Power like I’d felt a week ago when I played “Star Dust” and almost lost my mind.
The story of John Henry battling the steam engine flashed through my thoughts and I felt I understood what that was like, just a little, but the machines I fought were political and magical. Despite my abilities, I could never take them all on. Success was flat-out impossible to achieve, but I was going to do it anyway.
Even if I had to work through the night into the day with fire leaping up from my back, even if I was reduced to ash and re-formed again, I was going to do it anyway, because Greta had called my name, had screamed for her daddy, and nothing was going to keep me from her, too late or not too late, even if it was just to stand over her body and hold the head of her killer next to her still, unmoving corpse and say, “I got him for you, Greta. I killed him.”
I didn’t notice when the building began to tilt, its foundation utterly destroyed. I was trapped in a loop of pity, hate, loss, and vengeance, because I hadn’t just lost Greta, I’d lost Marilyn all over again, and now possibly Tabitha, too, and a man like me doesn’t know what to do with those emotions except to lash out at something.
A car horn—Fang’s horn—cut through my reverie.
“Who the hell is honking my horn?” The words passed my lips and then I heard it, a steadily increasing groan of shifting concrete and steel. It didn’t happen fast, but once it started, there was no stopping it. My animals, the survivors, scattered—fully aware, as animals often are, that it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.
The wards held for an hour. Fang played “Toy Soldiers” by Martika as the two of us watched from the top of the neighboring parking deck. Sparks of prismatic energy arced between the sagging frame of the Highland Towers and the concrete around us as the wards lost their game of inches. And when they failed, it was with a whimper, not a bang. The wards winked out. All went still. Then the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, straight for us. Fang kicked into reverse and hauled ass through the far wall of the deck, off and over.
Concrete crumbled as the Highland Towers broke and twisted near the middle, a jagged crack spreading out along the points of structural failure. The fifteen-story building struck the eight-level parking deck we’d just vacated and continued through the deck, crushing it almost to ground level. Joined together in catastrophic architectural union, the two buildings became one, the Highland Towers semi-intact and at a steep angle, supported by the collapsed bulk of the parking deck and the overpriced cars within.
I became the revenant and ghosted through the wreckage—an angry, vengeance-seeking ghost with hell in my step and damnation in my gaze.
50
ERIC:
DEATH TO MING
There was no need for words. Not for me. No explanation, no story could have averted my wrath, but that didn’t stop Phillip from trying. At the new intersection between the parking deck and Phil’s penthouse, I was met by a wavering blue ward, Phillip’s secondary backup. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as the main system. Overtaxed by holding the room together as best it could, the ward granted me a view of Phillip’s ruined lair.
With the floor at an angle of over forty-five degrees, all the knickknacks had fallen from their shelves and many of them lay broken on the floor, collecting at the lowest point of the room, past curtains askew and partially detached from the rods upon which they’d once regally hung. Roger’s soul spiraled up from the broken soul warden—the overgrown marble that had imprisoned him. He passed through the barrier, recognizing me too late.
“Eric, enough—”
I had no words for him either, only death more final than he might have deserved. He sank into my ghostly body and if he screamed, I didn’t notice because my eyes were on the corpse of a fortysomething woman with blond hair, lying on the ground. When most Vlads die, those few whose kill requirements don’t result in a destruction of the body, they rapidly age toward their true span of years upon the earth. I’d turned Greta when she was twenty-one. I’d often wondered what she might have looked like as she aged. Now I knew.
“Eric.” Phillip scrambled about the wreckage, fumbling for something amid the debris. “Look.” He gestured toward a vampire who was staked and bound. I recognized her from a distantly remembered dream—Lisette. “We found Lisette for you. See? You went to Paris to find her and she came here.”
He’d killed her. He’d killed Greta. No one had to tell me. I knew.
Percy sat in the remains of an easy chair.
“Percy.” Phillip’s voice cracked, panic reined in but not conquered as he continued to search. “Tell him, Percy. You saw everything.”
“Yes,” Percy agreed. “I saw everything. I’m seeing everything now. It’s what I do.”
Phillip sobbed, eyes lighting from within as he found what he’d been searching for and attempted to conceal it within the sleeve of his Victorian jacket.
I flicked the ward with my thumb and middle finger. Bright blue sparks flew like mutant fireflies as the energy field collapsed. A groan announced the absence of the structural reinforcement it had been providing, and dust fell from the ceiling as everything shifted a bit more.
Methane rose from the gas fireplace in a steady stream, tainting the air. Lord Phillip gestured at me with a piece of copper in the shape of a rod, and lightning rushed along its length, striking me and igniting the methane in one big kaboom. I ghosted as it happened and when the smoke cleared, Phillip gasped at the sight of me, standing exactly where I had been before the explosion.
A single step brought me inside his lair. When the second lightning strike came, I mistimed my shift to revenant form and took the full brunt of the blast. It cooked my clothes and fried my synapses, but it couldn’t kill me. It was only lightning. My foot struck the frame of an ornate mirror wrought with dragons and I picked it up. My reflection looked up at me, out of synch with reality, and I gave it a head butt, shattering the glass. A small demon trilled its freedom to the universe as the fly-sized being rose from the mirror, but I caught it in my fist and crushed it until it popped, a tiny jelly-bean of ichor.
Then, I threw the mirror at Phillip. It shattered all over the floor and the wall behind him. He’d turned to mist.
“Come now, Eric,” he said. “I’m sure we can . . .”
But I wasn’t hearing Phillip any longer, I was hearing the voice of Sydney Greenstreet in the movies behind my eyes, the good ones in black and white where this kind of thing turns out right at the end and the bad guys go to jail and the hero . . . the hero . . .
But I’m not a hero.
If I was, he wouldn’t have beaten me. If I was, I wouldn’t have been having three-ways in Paris while my daughter was b
eing captured and tortured to death in Void City. If I was a hero, none of this would have happened.
But monsters can win too. Just watch a slasher film or, worse yet, pick up a newspaper.
Phillip’s words went by unnoticed. It was a grand speech, peppered with quotes from famous men in languages long dead or rarely used. It was witty and irreverent, clever and charming. I probably would have laughed if I’d been paying any attention to it. Perhaps I did laugh. I don’t remember.
I inhaled, my mouth gaping open in defiance of its natural boundaries. Percy drew a small golden ankh from beneath his shirt, but remained otherwise motionless. His ankh blazed brightly, a flickering candle against the hurricane, but a candle that did not go out.
“Eric! No!” Phillip screamed. “Please. We’ll—”
Light, all of it save the light from Percy’s ankh, bent as if my inhalation was sucking it in. Phillip came with it, his spirit torn free of a long dead body, transmuted to water vapor, which, absent his spirit to bind it together, fell apart and rained down upon the rubble like a brief summer storm.
I devoured Lisette next, ignoring the few French words her spirit muttered as her body turned to dust and even the dust was drawn into my vortex of anger, hate, sorrow, and desire. It was a desire for a better time, a wish for things to work like they did in the movies, a crushed hope that just once, just this one time . . .
Unlike Phillip, she tried to fight me. We merged together with the same unholy intimacy I’d shared with the girl whose name I no longer remembered, the one from my honeymoon night, the one who’d wanted to see the Eiffel Tower.
“This can’t happen,” Lisette screeched as she tried to push free of me, arm against my shoulders, only to scream again as her spirit sank back within mine. And it was done. I killed Lisette and I killed Phil.
“I got them for you, Greta.” I reached for her corpse. “I’m sorry I was late, but—”
“You can get her back.” Percy spoke the words, and they knocked me down as surely as la Bête’s mighty paws had done in our first encounter.