Of course, that line belonged to Hamlet's "mommy dearest" so maybe she wasn't the best refuge for moral gravitas.
Everyone around me had been yammering about clinical depression for the past six months. Was I really so far down in the emotional depths that I was ready for the ultimate analgesic? Tennyson understood that grief was not necessarily a bad thing. He wrote: "Let love clasp grief lest both be drowned . . ." Drowned . . . right, now there's a fitting analogy . . . "Let darkness keep her raven gloss. / Oh, better to be drunk with loss, / To dance with death, to beat the ground . . ."
Well, one last dance and let's be honest: I was more invested in payback than survival, now. Too bad either motivation was going to go unfulfilled.
My chest was on fire and my limbs were gone all leaden now. And then one of the fish folk flickered in and clamped razored teeth deep into my upper thigh. I grimaced and choked involuntarily on a lungful of water. It was like taking a sledgehammer to the chest and my skull burst like a bubble under deep, dark waters.
Chapter Four
It wasn't like going into a tunnel of light . . .
It was like going into a swank and pricey restaurant with my ex-fiancée on my arm.
I hadn't seen the wine list, yet, but the starfish was wearing a tuxedo.
"Ah, Monsieur Cséjthe, Mademoiselle Garou!" it exclaimed. "Welcome to Club Palmyra! Will you be dining with the captain this evening?"
More than a few neurologists are of the opinion that the whole "life after life" phenomenon is nothing more than oxygen-deprived brain cells firing off random memories—a free-association meltdown as consciousness gutters out like a dying candle flame.
I looked across the restaurant with the oceanic décor and ship motifs. A tiger was seated at a table on an elevated dais in a clamshell-shaped alcove. It was too far away to see if it was dining on a bowl of breakfast cereal.
Such theories might vaguely explain my watery death segueing into a watery night out on the town and a trip to a weird theme restaurant.
The tiger waved a furry paw in our direction.
Perhaps vague was too strong a term . . .
I looked at my ex. When they say that pregnant women glow, I don't think it means that they actually shed light. Lupé, however, was giving off enough illumination to pass as a giant nightlight. Her thick brown hair was piled on top of her head and the expanse of décolletage and back revealed by her scalloped evening dress had lightened up considerably from its customary coffee-and-cream complexion. I raised a hand to shield my eyes as she amped up the "glow" another hundred candlepower. "What do you think, dear?"
She patted her swollen belly as hair started to sprout across her face. "Is it safe for the baby, Patrick?" she asked, as if the maître d' were an old friend. "You know how important he is to the Old Ones."
"You mean the elves, right?" I asked.
The starfish adjusted the small towel draped over an armlike appendage. "Do not worry, Mademoiselle; Prince Dakkar has restricted his diet to seafood these past one hundred and fifty years."
I was suddenly hungry. Actually, I felt as though I'd been starving for weeks and had just now noticed it. "Seafood," I said. "Do you have clam chowder?"
The starfish bowed slightly. "Of course, sir. Though we restrict our menu to the New England recipe. Manhattan style, if you'll forgive my impertinence, is an abomination and we do not countenance it here."
"Er, okay," I said, noticing that the floor was very wet.
"This way, please," our pentagrammic maître d' announced.
I looked at Lupé who linked her arm in mine. She had accessorized with a fur stole and it was hard to tell where the stole ended and her arm began. Her face was completely furry now and beginning to elongate into a pronounced snout. The proliferation of hair was eclipsing her pearly radiance and the effect was much like the moon slipping behind a darkening cloud. I was so distracted I didn't notice that the water was actually rising until it was above our ankles.
"Isn't this taking the whole marine-ambience thing a bit to excess?" I asked.
Lupé, seemingly oblivious to the dark waters now swirling up to her knees, tapped our echinodermic attendant on the—er—shoulder. "I'm not that big on fish," she said. "What would you recommend?"
"Maybe a little less surf and a little more turf," I grumped as the water wicked up my pants legs.
Our escort leaned back and whispered conspiratorially: "I'm not supposed to espouse menu favorites but the Krabby Patties are to die for."
"You don't say?" I refrained from asking if there was a SpongeBob Happy Meal.
It was slow going, now, as the water had reached my waist and Lupé was getting ready to dog-paddle. "You know," I said, "as brain death hallucinations go, I could've drawn a lot worse from the deck of my life—especially the last couple of years. But I'm drowning in a freshwater tributary, not a saltwater ecosystem. And I'm totally not gettin' the Tony the Tiger/Guess Who's Coming to Dinner vibe . . ."
The starfish stopped and turned to me as the lights in the restaurant flickered and went out. Lupé lost form and became a beam of light, cutting through murky waters that had risen above our heads. The light put the five-limbed creature in silhouette and it changed subtly.
"Time is short, small one." His voice echoed strangely, as if from a great distance. More than that, it seemed weighted with the age of untold centuries. Millennia . . .
"Your son must be sacrificed before the sleeping god wakes or your race will come to a terrible end."
"What?" I felt as if an electric shock had just exploded throughout my body leaving me numbed, burned, and dazed. "What are you saying?"
"In the end you must sacrifice him. If not for humanity's sake, then for his own. You would not want him to live in such a world as would be ruled by the Dread Master of R'lyeh!"
I didn't have a clue as to who this so-called dead master of really something or other was but he was in for a real ass-kicking if he posed a threat to my unborn son. Likewise anybody even hinting at bad karma for Chris Cséjthe's pride and joy.
"Free will is but a human delusion, a cosmic self-deception for your infant race," he continued and his voice began to diminish, as if he were starting to move away from me and picking up speed. "I tell you this one last thing. Ignore it at your peril and the doom of your entire species!"
Great, a seafood restaurant with a waiter who doubled as a fortune cookie. "I'm all ears, Garçon." I growled.
"You cannot order the calamari," it rasped in nearly inhuman tones, "it orders you . . ."
A fishy face suddenly swam into view, its buggy luminous eyes staring at me above an expression of gape-mouthed surprise.
I reached out with my hand, trying to grab its neck but it pulled back. Neither of us was fast enough: I couldn't get my fingers behind his head and he couldn't totally evade my hand. I ripped his throat out, instead.
A cloud of blackish blood erupted from its torn flesh and it sank out of sight. Either this particular water bogie was made of papier-mâché or . . . I looked at my hand: small clumps of sushi still clung to my razor-tipped fingers!
My razor-edged, straightjacket-shredding talons had reappeared like ten spring-loaded switchblades!
Another froggy foe darted in and it was time to focus on matters directly at hand. All I had time to register was someone had shoved a scuba mouthpiece halfway down my throat and that the murky water had brightened considerably. I could see the other two more clearly, now, and prepare for their attacks.
And this time the flipper was on the other foot. As the second fish-man darted in, I threw up an arm block across his throat to keep his teeth from my face. The back of my hand and forearm had snagged a piece of silvery kelp, a ribbonlike leaf that stood out edgewise from my skin. When fish-face pushed up against the edge there was a burst of bubbles and blackish blood.
Its, not mine.
Of course this could still be part of the brain-death dream rave.
Which would account for the dispositio
n of my third finny foe: he seemed to be occupied.
A bright light cut through the water illuminating a series of tableaus beyond. In the distance I could make out a large, batty form going all Maytag agitation cycle on a cluster of froggy folk. Apparently he merited more attention than half-monster me. Other silhouettes, however, were bottom-walking past him and in my direction, the light at their backs. If I didn't finish my third assailant quickly, they'd be upon me before I could find a way to climb back out of the river.
But my third assailant had an assailant of its own. An arm was wrapped across its scaly torso while another clutched at its goggle-eyed head. That arm snapped back and the fish-man's head twisted past the point of spinal cohesion. I could hear its neck snap even underwater. Then I got a glimpse of my foe's foe.
It looked like a woman.
A human woman.
Or, maybe, not-so-human as she bore a strong resemblance to Suki, one of Stefan Pagelovitch's vampire enforcers.
Her eyes looked dead.
Then the light went out.
Most of it, anyway.
There was still enough ambient light filtering down from above to reveal my immediate surroundings. But the creature that had saved me, and the other figures beyond, were now in murk and darkness, as if a great underwater searchlight had been switched off.
I looked up again and saw the keel of the New Moon about twenty feet above me and over a ways.
Vampires don't swim, they sink like a rock. Once in, they don't come back out. But I reached up and pushed down with cupped hands, kicking off the riverbed as if I still had a modicum of buoyancy.
And I began to rise!
I swam to the surface and then splashed my way to shore. I reached up to pull the breathing apparatus from my mouth but it was gone. By the time I had stumbled back up the gangplank and onto the boat, a large, batlike monster was wading ashore as well.
I climbed up onto the roof and scanned the waters from the secondary wheelhouse. All looked quiet. But, as Zotz joined me, shrunk down to human form and suddenly dry, I thought I could see something out in the main channel of the Ouachita River.
"I thought you couldn't swim," he said, offering me a towel.
"I thought you knew how to fish," I answered, taking it.
Something was moving under the surface of the river. Something big where the channel was deepest. A greater shadow shaped like a giant manta ray . . .
It moved away, angling upstream. Within a few minutes I couldn't tell if it had gone away or gone deeper to bide its time. I raised a hand to shade my eyes against the glare of ten thousand diamonds as the waters fractured the sunlight and reflected it back up at me.
"Hey!"
I turned and saw that Volpea had finally stirred from her lounge chair at the front of the boat. She was standing atop the ladder, one foot on the top deck, holding a saucepan stinking of burned blood and plastic. She pulled off her sunglasses for a better look.
"I thought they called you Bloodwalker!" she said, her mouth imitating our fishy visitors of just minutes before.
"Yeah? So?" Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Zotz was doing a similar fish-face impression.
"Maybe they should call you Daytripper, now," he rumbled, still in demon voice.
That's when I finally realized that I was standing out in broad daylight, getting a double dose of solar spectra, without turning into Cséjthe flambé!
* * *
Volpea called New Orleans.
Zotz called Mama Samm.
While Mama Samm called the Gator-man I wrote up a makeshift list and sent Zotz into town. He scanned my notes as he opened the door and headed for the gangplank. "Some of this may be a little hard to come by," he said.
I smiled and felt my face grow tight. We were adding spear guns to our on-board armory. Also, redundant fish-finder gear until I could get my hands on more state-of-the-art sonar equipment. "Improvise," I suggested.
"How about some Cajun fishing tackle? I know a couple of construction sites."
I shook my head. "It's illegal to even store dynamite, much less use it, without a permit."
Zotz sighed and looked down. "Hoss, I'd venture a guess that permits are about to be the least of your worries for the near future." He looked back up at me. "Wouldn't it be simpler to just cast off and move downriver?"
I looked back. "Like all the way down to New Orleans?"
He shrugged. "You know you're going."
I glanced over at Volpea who was across the salon and engaged in a conversation of her own. "Yes. But the moment the New Moon reaches Natchez, New Orleans will go to DefCon One."
"My offer still stands."
I sighed. "I am not climbing inside a demon's head."
"Better a willing Trojan Horse than an unwilling one," he argued. "Besides, the classification 'demon' may not be technically accurate."
"It's close enough, Hoss."
Camazotz Chamalcan believed that he was formed out of the essence of ten thousand tormented souls—human sacrifices to appease a concept that had no external reality. Up until the moment the pain and fear of those victims coalesced into a corporeal manifestation of mass horror, that is. Their essence became the abomination they were originally sacrificed to appease. Perhaps a little DNA of the prehistoric Desmodus draculae, the gigantic ancestor of the modern vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, got into the mix, somehow—a civilization's need to believe in darkness given form, created it out of their own.
He and I had spent many a long night discussing Plato's shadow creation concepts and the question of whether form follows function or function follows form.
I dreaded the day we segued into Calvinistic concepts of predestination.
Like any newborn infant, his overriding impulse upon first awakening was to feed. But achieving sentience centuries after the Mayans had vanished and the sacrifices had ceased, the Death-eater found it necessary to leave his watery womb and go out into the world in search of sustenance.
Which he found in overwhelming abundance.
Death was everywhere, to abbreviate Shelley.
And not just death but suffering . . .
Pain . . . horror . . .
More than the bread of wickedness and the wine of violence, it was a moveable feast with pogroms here and genocides there and more wars than rumors of war.
Until, at last, gorged beyond surfeit, he had stumbled back to his birthplace in the green oblivion of the timeless jungles, filled with tens of millions of deaths and sick with sins of a thousand civilizations. He tried to sleep, sought solace in the depths of the dark waters, but found that he could no longer rest, no longer find peace in the dreamless sleep of centuries. Others' deaths were now manifestly his Death. Others' sufferings were now his Suffering. The hopelessness of millions had become his own.
You are, as they say, what you eat.
How and why he had come to me was something that still didn't make much sense. Except that we were both unique and one of a kind as far as monsters go.
And neither of us wanted to be monsters any more.
So, I guess he thought he might learn from me. I don't know what he'd learned so far.
I, in turn, had learned from him these past six months and it was all I could do to keep from returning to Chichen Itza and do a Greg Louganis into the Well of Sacrifices. Anything to still the voices and memories inside my own head.
"Dr. Mooncloud is throwing two cases of medical gear into the back of an SUV even as we speak," Volpea announced as Zotz grumped his way off the boat. "She said she'll be here in five hours."
"She'll be here in four," I said, picking up my own cell phone.
"It's a five-hour drive—"
"Did you tell her I was sprouting stainless-steel manicures and walking around in broad daylight?"
She looked a little nonplussed. "Well . . . yes . . ."
I nodded. "She'll be here in less than four. Where's your other half?"
She looked even more uncomfortable. Maybe
it was because she was wearing nothing more than a teeny-weeny bikini and the air conditioner was on. "I'm calling him now."
"Not exactly a direct answer to the question. Maybe you can do better after he reports in." I turned my back on her and called Seattle.
Stefan Pagelovitch would sleep until sunset—which was two time zones later than here. As a master vampire, he could be roused during the day for emergencies but I wasn't about to strain our relationship any more than it already was.
So I spoke to Ancho.
The vivani was a member of the Seattle enclave that Pagelovitch ruled but wasn't a vampire, himself. He had once referred to himself as a "dusky elf"—something I hadn't taken seriously at the time because I was still freshly traumatized by my initial exposure to the other Things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. Besides, a vivani didn't look anything like those cutesy books of Tinkerbell clones they sell in quaint little bookshoppes, Renfaires, and scifi conventions.
Ancho looked like a big, hairy man with long, sharp fingernails.
He had claimed that the taxonomy of elvenkind was split along three branches: dark, light, and dusky. We didn't get much deeper than that back then as I was still doing my basic research on neck biters. It had taken a major leap of—what? Faith? Credulity? To accept that mutagenic viruses could reprogram human DNA and sufficiently mutate the biological processes to actually create the undead condition. Okay, I was able to move vampirism out of the realm of superstition and into the realm of science.
Werewolves were a little more troubling.
Issues of displaced mass got into a level of physics that was way beyond my comfort level. Still, there was enough medical and zoological data to make some actual sense of what I saw and experienced. And living with a lycanthrope tends to help you over the hump of skepticism.
Ghosts?
The phantasmagorical appearances of my dead wife had not entirely convinced me that she was more than a side effect of the necrophagic virus playing havoc with the perceptual centers of my brain. In other words, I had chalked Jenny's post mortem appearances up to occipital delusions.
But my own little out-of-the-body experience with the shade of former vampire J.D. acting as tour guide had proved pretty convincing. I could now believe in the unseen.
Dead Easy Page 8