by J. S. Volpe
* * *
Ten minutes later he pulled his black ZipGo MeteoRight up to the southwest corner of Zonster Avenue and South Scapula, a corner occupied by the Thirteenth Church of Ilva, a looming basalt structure with a crenellated roof rimmed with gargoyles, all of whom appeared to be dormant (though you could never be quite sure with that bizarrely sedentary species).
There was no sign of Solace anywhere. There was no sign of anyone (aside from the gargoyles). The corner, and every street around, was dark and still.
He was beginning to wonder if he had misunderstood her, or if something bad had happened, when a figure detached itself from the shadows in the church’s recessed and unlit front doorway and strode across the pavement toward the car.
It was her. She wore a black coat so long it enwrapped her from neck to ankles. Her hair was long, straight, and loose, a look that pleased him. It was how she had been wearing it the first time they met, and it remained his favorite.
He pushed the dashboard button that opened the passenger door. She climbed in, the old familiar scent of her filling the car, the rustles as she settled into her seat sounding loud in the enclosed space on this quiet night.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said.
In the shifting light of the multsy unit’s holographic dashboard display, she didn’t look too good. Her face was strained and haggard and seemed more lined than he remembered. Her eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark bags under them. Her hair needed brushing, too: Stray strands formed a frizzy halo, a witchy look appropriate to many residents of Ravenshaft, but not to her.
He also noted that the left-hand pocket of her coat bulged with something thick and squarish. It was about the right size for a neatly folded pair of women’s elbow-length gloves. Then again, it was the right size for all kinds of things.
“So what now?” he asked.
“Do you know where Pumpkin Lane is?”
“The name rings a bell, but…”
She nodded as if she had expected this. “Just follow my directions.” She pointed at the windshield. “Head straight down Zonster for now.”
He drove. Ranks of dark buildings slid past. Here and there a lone lit window revealed the presence of an insomniac or a third-shift worker. The only sounds were the faint hum of the car’s ZipTek engine and the murmur of voices and music from the multsy unit, whose volume Reynard had turned down to an indecipherable level, rendering the unit’s ever-shifting holographic images completely inscrutable. Right now, for instance, it showed a top hat.
“Care to tell me what’s going on?” he said.
When ten seconds passed without an answer, or rather with Solace’s silence being her answer, he looked over at her. Her eyes were fixed on the street ahead, her brow creased with concentration.
“I think our turn’s coming up,” she said quietly. Though she didn’t look straight at him, he could tell by the way her eyes kept flicking slightly toward him that she was watching him in her peripheral vision.
“Solace.” He filled his voice with disappointment. It was the tone you would use with a child who has done bad despite knowing better.
She slumped a little with a faint weary exhalation, her shoulders sinking. Blue light washed across her face as the multsy unit displayed an underwater scene of sharks swimming past a sunken ship. Her eyes never left the road.
“I just—I can’t talk about it.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
After a pause she finally looked at him. “Reynard, please. It’s personal.” Her eyes met his for a moment, then slid away to resume their watch on the street signs.
Before he could decide how, or if, to respond, she said, “Turn left up here, by the doll store.” She gestured at the Coffin Road intersection, the northwest corner of which was occupied by Ghoulette’s Ghastly Dolls. A sign in the window read: “Dolls of all kinds—rag, bone, china, mechanical, voodoo, and elsewhat!”
He turned down Coffin, a mostly residential street. The MeteoRight juddered on the brick pavement as they passed between the rows of houses, most of which sported the mansard roofs and spiked cast-iron fences that seemed to be Belladonna’s national architectural motifs.
The dashboard holographic display flashed an image of a field of cornflowers. Simultaneously Reynard caught a faint whiff of the flower’s scent, a sensation beamed straight to his brain courtesy of the unit’s telepathic interface, which he had turned down along with the sound. Good thing, too; given how strong the muted version was, he would be gagging on it at normal strength.
Solace frowned at the multsy unit. “Could you turn that off, please? It’s distracting.”
“Sure.” He pushed a button below the display. The cornflowers and their smell and the muffled strains of music all vanished.
“Sorry, but I just don’t like multsy,” Solace said. “It’s intrusive, and it leaves nothing to the imagination. I don’t want everything defined for me. I prefer a little mystery and personal creativity.”
“Yeah. I’m not a big fan myself.” Actually he didn’t care one way or another, and he doubted she did very much either. He suspected that her grousing was a way of diverting her mind from her anxieties. And of diverting the conversation from her reasons for this journey.
He decided to let her have her way. For now.
As they had progressed down Coffin, the neighborhood had steadily deteriorated. The houses were in increasing states of disrepair, the lawns dead and brown, the gutters clotted with trash, half the street lamps smashed and dark. On the porch of one dilapidated house with shattered windows and a sagging roof, three figures sat in chairs, unmoving. It was too dark to tell if they were awake, or asleep, or even alive. In the distance a dog heaved out a chain of barks so savage it sounded as if it hoped to maim or kill by the noise alone.
“Turn at the next left,” Solace said. “Frayn Street.”
Reynard did so with a small frown. Why did Frayn Street sound familiar? As he maneuvered the car down the narrow lane, past houses with Condemned signs on the crooked doors, past illegible graffiti scrawled on walls, past junked cars sharing driveway space with grimy children’s toys, Reynard dug through his memory to identify where he had heard the name before.
The mystery was answered by the appearance of a house on the north side of the street whose door was crisscrossed with the bright glowing orange stop-strips the Watch used to identify and (in theory) block civilian access to crime scenes.
Of course. This house had been in the news last week. The family who lived there—a husband and wife, five kids aged four months to twelve years, the wife’s sister, and a pet pubble—had been slaughtered in the dead of night without the neighbors seeing or hearing anything. Or at least without any of them admitting to it.
Last he heard, the Watch had no leads, no evidence, not even a possible motive. It was just a family—normal, poor, and unremarkable. Now they weren’t anything.
“Solace, if there’s trouble maybe I can help,” he said, surprised at the sound of his own voice. He hadn’t known he was going to speak until the words were streaming from his mouth.
“You are.”
“You know what I mean.”
She sighed. He glanced at her. Though she had turned away from him to look out the window, he could see her face reflected in the glass. Her eyes were distant, preoccupied.
“Thanks, but there’s nothing you can do beyond what you’re already doing,” she said, her gaze never wavering from the dark world outside.
The weary fatalism in her voice startled him. It was a tone he had never heard from her before.
“Turn right,” she said.
He did, noting the new street was Pumpkin Lane, presumably their destination. It looked much the same as Frayn.
He kept expecting her to tell him to stop or pull into a driveway, but she didn’t, and the car traveled down Pumpkin Lane for five minutes, then ten, the houses and occasional businesses growing sparser, with fields and copses and in one case an old we
edy cemetery separating them. Before long he realized they had entered the city’s far north side. Not the best place to be at night. Or during the day, for that matter. This was where Ravenshaft’s high disappearance rate and high homicide rate were highest.
Soon the road began to wind amid low, rocky hills dense with pines that loomed tall and black in the night. In the valley between two such hills they glimpsed an ancient industrial building, its once-white walls now grimy gray. A loading dock door stood open, and in the depths of the structure a campfire flickered.
They weren’t even technically in the city anymore, Reynard realized; they had entered the wild and desolate country beyond, a region called Black Pines.
“It’s just up ahead,” Solace said.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her touch the bulge in her coat pocket as if to confirm it was still there. She quickly withdrew her hand and laid it atop the other one in her lap. Then she glanced at him. He stared straight ahead and pretended not to have seen a thing.
They jounced across a rickety tin bridge. Five hundred feet beyond it on the right, a large structure bulked amid the trees.
“There,” Solace said. “Go in there.”
He pulled the MeteoRight into a gravel lot that fronted a long, low wooden building whose sides were denuded of all but a few stubbornly clinging strips of blue-gray paint. The building had no windows, and where the front door should have been was a rectangle opening on blackness. A porch extended the length of the façade, and on it sat a line of weathered rocking chairs. No one was in sight.
Reynard parked the car in the middle of the lot, headlights trained on the façade. He left the engine running.
“This it, then?” he said.
Solace didn’t answer. Her eyes were fixed on the doorless doorway.
“Do you want me to—”
He had been about to say “kill the headlights” but she cut him off, turning to him and saying: “Whatever happens, don’t get out of the car.”
“What? But—”
“Promise me.”
He hesitated, the very nature of the request inclining him not to grant it.
“Please, Reynard,” she said. “Everything’ll be fine as long as you stay in the car.”
He stared at her, unsure how to respond. It was clear she believed what she was saying. The problem was, the request presupposed she had anticipated all eventualities, which not even the smartest or wisest or wiliest could ever truly do.
Despite his doubts, he said, “All right.” That was what she wanted to hear. She wouldn’t be satisfied till he said it. But just because he said it didn’t mean he had to stick to it.
“Thank you,” she said. She glanced out the windshield and went stiff. “Oh!”
He followed her gaze. While they had been talking, the front porch had filled with nearly two dozen individuals, mostly grim, hulking, black-garbed men. Bodyguards, from the look of it. There were four others present as well, presumably the bodies to be guarded.
The first was a tall, thin man with long white hair tied back with a red ribbon. He wore a cream-colored suit and white leather gloves and boots. His erect posture, haughty countenance, and position at the forefront of the group, with the toes of his boots nearly touching the edge of the tilted and dry-rotted wooden stairs that descended to the gravel lot, suggested he was the group’s leader.
The second was a man barely five feet tall yet so fat he was nearly a sphere. He wore a multicolored waistcoat over a dark blue silk shirt, a pair of black pants, black leather boots, and a black beret. His eyes were narrow and suspicious as he peered at the car over a pair of tinted pince-nez glasses.
The third was a bald, skeletal man in a double-breasted white lab coat tightly buttoned all the way from the high collar to the hem midway down his shins. He sat on the arm of one of the rocking chairs, watching the car from under his lowered brows with a tired and faintly disgusted expression.
The last was a slim young woman whose bronze skin and jet-black hair marked her as a member of the Nations, and whose multicolored headband and fringed green-and-orange jacket sported designs particular to the long-extinct tribe called the Nanshee. The hand extending from the jacket’s left sleeve was prosthetic, but unlike most prosthetic appendages these days, it was not covered with a Skinthetic shell to make it look real; instead the woman had chosen to expose the metal and wires for all to see.
Reynard’s blood ran cold. The Nanshee designs. The mechanical hand. This could only be Nimbus, the former Nanshee tracker who was ranked among the most notorious vampires in history and was one of the select few known to have survived a battle with Hull, the legendary vampire hunter. As it was, the battle had claimed her hand and left her trapped all alone in an underground vault for several centuries, an experience from which she emerged half mad and packed with hate. She was one of the vampires who had opted to continue their ancient, brutal ways in secret and risk imprisonment or death rather than capitulate to the UR.
As soon as Reynard had identified Nimbus—and concomitantly realized that the eerily smooth, pale complexions of the figures on the porch was due not to the glare of the headlights as he had hitherto assumed but to their being vampires—he belatedly identified the white-haired man as Jelain Belloc, the discovery of whose so-called Torture Circus a few decades ago in Briésk had sickened the whole UR and set back the Vampire Rights movement a hundred years.
“Solace—” Reynard began, turning to her, hoping to urge her not to go, or at least to let him go with her.
But she was already opening the door and stepping out. As she turned to close the door behind her, she bent down a little and looked in at him.
“Just stay here,” she said softly, then shut the door before he could reply.
He watched her walk into and along the beams of the car’s headlights, her back so brightly lit it seemed as if he could see every thread of her coat and every strand of her black hair. Her huge shadow lurched about on the building’s façade, those on the porch eclipsed within it. The shadow grew smaller as she neared the porch, as if she were losing puissance the closer she got to those who awaited her.
She stopped at the foot of the steps. One side of Belloc’s mouth rose in a smug smile. Nimbus watched Solace with deceptive blankness. The fat vampire clasped his hands behind his back and puffed out his chest self-importantly. The bald vampire eyed Solace as if she were a distinctly uninteresting bug. The bodyguards stood as stiff as the posts that supported the porch’s roof.
Reynard could see only Solace’s back, but given the small, quick movements of her head and shoulders and the way the vampires were watching her, it was clear she was speaking.
Hoping to hear what she was saying, he rolled down the driver’s side window. He could now make out the soft, feminine strains of her voice, but the hum of the car’s engine, low though it was, muffled the words. He reached for the car’s off switch, then stopped and lowered his arm. Bad idea. Turning off the engine now, with the undertaking well underway, would be open to misinterpretations that could get Solace hurt. Besides, if things went wrong, he wanted to have the engine running for a quick getaway.
Belloc drew back in surprise at something Solace said. He regarded her in silence for a moment. Then his eyes narrowed, and he turned to speak to the fat vampire.
Though Solace’s words were lost to Reynard, everyone else’s were clear as water, for one of the countless skills he had mastered over the millennia was lip reading. And what Belloc now said was: “Is this true?”
Everyone looked at the fat vampire. His only response was to scowl at Solace, then turn to look at the bald vampire and say, “Well? You’d know better than I.”
All heads now turned to the bald vampire. He regarded Solace from beneath his brows for a moment, then shifted his gaze to the MeteoRight. Although it seemed unlikely he could see inside the car over the glare of the headlights, it certainly looked to Reynard as if the vampire’s cold eyes were fixed right on him. After a couple of s
econds the bald vampire’s upper body gave a quick, spasmodic jerk, a movement that Reynard at first interpreted as a cough or a hiccup, then realized was the byproduct of a terse, humorless laugh. Shaking his head, the vampire turned back to the others and said, “Only for a month.”
The fat vampire looked puzzled. Nimbus scrutinized the bald vampire, then fixed an appraisive gaze on Solace. Belloc’s expression reverted to its former aloofness, and he said, “What about the other four?”
Solace responded. The fat vampire thrust a plump finger at her and snapped, “That’s not true!” Both Solace and Belloc ignored him.
Solace then said something that reduced everyone to complete silence and immobility, except two of the black-clad bodyguards, who glanced at each other.
Eyes narrow with suspicion, Nimbus said, “Did you know about this?” to Belloc. Belloc said nothing, merely stared at Solace as if waiting for something.
Solace spoke for ten seconds straight, then dug into her left coat pocket and withdrew a small squarish object wrapped in a white cloth.
Everyone on the porch once again went very still, their eyes fixed on the white-shrouded object in her outstretched hand.
Belloc said, “Yes.” The bald vampire stiffened and goggled at him.
Solace said something. Belloc said, “Indeed we will.” Nimbus, the fat vampire, and the bodyguards were watching either Solace or Belloc. No one but Reynard was paying attention to the bald vampire.
Big mistake.
Over the years Reynard had gotten quite adept at scenting trouble. His livelihood depended on knowing when a mark had divined a scam, or who was an undercover Watch officer, or how close to cracking someone was. And right now, given the way the bald vampire sat there, his muscles tight as cables and his glaring eyes fixed on Belloc, Reynard’s instincts were telling him that this was one of those individuals who might appear fairly sane on the surface, but underneath it all are completely fucking batshit crazy and only one wrong moment away from going supernova on everyone and everything around them.
And that wrong moment was now.
Reynard’s heart, already fast, started racing as the bald vampire sprang to his feet in one crisp movement. The vampire’s eyes were slits, and his lips were pursed like the world’s tightest sphincter.
Smiling calmly down at Solace, Belloc extended one pale, slender hand. Solace stepped up onto the bottom step, holding out the white-wrapped object.
The bald vampire breezed past Nimbus and the fat vampire, neither of whom understood what was happening; they only stared at him in mild puzzlement as he strode toward the delivery in progress. None of the bodyguards were doing anything either, even though a couple of them were watching the bald vampire’s advance.
That’s the trouble with people who are secretly batshit crazy: You think they’re normal right up until the very moment they supernova in your face, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it.
Reynard grabbed the handle to open the car door despite his near certainty there was no way he could stop the man in time. Even if he shouted something, no one would grasp what he was trying to tell them until it was too late. The bodyguards would instinctively see him as the potential threat while the bald vampire would ignore Reynard and continue stalking toward Solace and Belloc to do whatever it was he was planning to do. Something batshit crazy, no doubt.
As Reynard pulled the handle and the door snapped open, he glanced at the porch and saw the bald vampire slip a hand under the flap of his long white coat midway up his chest. The vampire’s slitted eyes glistened darkly in the headlights. His lips were compressed almost into nonexistence.
Reynard pushed open the car door, seeing as he did so that he had been right: The damn bodyguards shifted their attention to him, even the two who had noticed the bald vampire’s inexplicable advance. But what the hell else could Reynard do? He had to try to stop whatever was going to happen, and he didn’t have a whole lot of options as to how.
As he swung his feet out onto the gravel, the bald vampire’s arm slid mid-forearm deep under the coat, paused, then began moving out, having found what it sought. Solace ascended to the second step, the white-wrapped object rising toward Belloc’s open hand.
Solace froze. She had spotted the bald vampire approaching. He saw that she had seen him, and his upper lip peeled back in a mocking sneer, revealing two white fangs that shone white in the headlights.
Reynard twisted out through the door. In response, several of the bodyguards sprang to life, some baring fangs, others thrusting their hands deep inside their jackets much as the bald vampire had done, all of them ready to pounce on Reynard. Meanwhile, still unnoticed by the guards, the bald vampire’s hand was about to emerge from under his coat along with whatever it held.
Solace said something to the bald vampire. The bald vampire stopped, blinked, frowned at her.
Reynard froze half out of the car, watching, waiting. A few of the bodyguards had realized something unusual was happening right there on the porch, though since they weren’t yet sure what, they were dividing their attention between Solace, the bald vampire, and Belloc in hopes of discerning the truth.
Belloc turned and saw his associate standing only a few steps away, hand frozen under his coat. Belloc looked back at Solace, puzzled.
Solace spoke again. The bald vampire’s mouth moved in a complicated way, as if he wanted to grimace and spit at the same time.
Belloc turned to the bald vampire and said, “I think she’s right.” The bald vampire only glowered at Solace in response.
Solace said something. Belloc gave her a faint smile. The bald vampire’s shoulders slumped.
The hand slid all the way back to mid-forearm depth under the coat, then slid out again, empty. All the while the bald vampire’s eyes never left Solace’s face.
Belloc glanced at his compatriot—or perhaps now his former compatriot—and said, “An excellent idea.”
The bald vampire stood rigid for a moment, eyes still fixed on Solace, then took a deep breath and shouted “Cattle!” loud enough for Reynard to hear it clearly over the engine’s hum.
The bald vampire stormed back to his rocking chair and flung himself into it so hard the top of the backrest slammed against the wall. Face crumpled in a petulant frown, arms folded across his chest, he rocked rapidly. He looked like a child who hasn’t been allowed to have dessert.
Belloc watched him for a moment, then turned back to Solace and said, “Thank you.”
He plucked the cloth-wrapped object from Solace’s still-outstretched hand. He began to unwrap it, then glanced up at Reynard, who still stood behind the MeteoRight’s open door.
“Does he know?” Belloc asked.
Solace’s reply made him cock an eyebrow at Reynard again, then lift one edge of the cloth and peek at the object beneath in a way that ensured Reynard couldn’t see anything.
Feeling embarrassed for some reason, Reynard slipped back into the car and shut the door. When he looked again at the scene on the porch, Belloc was tucking the cloth-wrapped object into his pocket. Belloc then turned to Nimbus and the fat vampire and said, “That’s that.”
Nimbus gave Solace a wry smile and said, “Next time, just keep walking.”
Solace said something that made Nimbus laugh softly.
Belloc turned back to Solace and said, “I sincerely hope we don’t meet again.” Without awaiting a reply, he whirled about and strode inside the dark building. While the others on the porch filed in after him, Solace returned to the car.
She got in and shut the door. Reynard didn’t move, just sat there watching the others vanish one by one through the doorway. Except the bald vampire, who continued to rock, a hateful scowl fixed on the porch floor in front of him.
“We can go,” Solace said quietly, her voice muffled. Reynard knew without looking that she was turned away from him to gaze out the passenger window. “It’s over.”
Reynard still didn’t move. The last of the bodyguards disappeared in
side. The bald vampire kept rocking and scowling.
There was a long pause. The only sound was the hum of the motor.
“Thank you,” Solace said finally, the clarity of her voice indicating she had finally turned to look at him.
Reynard continued watching the porch. The bald vampire abruptly froze at the farthest point of the chair’s backward rock, his legs stiff and braced, the chair resting on the rearmost two inches of its curved supports. He gave Reynard’s car a long, spiteful sneer, then launched himself to his feet and stomped into the building. The chair, set in motion by his brusque rise, rocked unoccupied, its arcs fast and violent at first but quickly diminishing to slow, gentle rolls.
Reynard turned the car around, and they headed back the way they had come.
“You gonna tell me what that was all about?” he asked as they crossed the tin bridge.
After a pause she said, “I’m sorry, but I’d prefer not to talk about it.” She sounded tired, wrung out, a little irritable.
“So, what, you drag me all the way out here, and I never even get to find out why?”
“I’ll tell you some day.”
He grunted. He didn’t believe her, and he could tell from her tone that she didn’t believe what she was saying either.
His disbelief must have been as obvious as hers, because she sighed and said, “Look, Reynard, I was in trouble, okay? I needed help, and you helped me. Do you really need to know why?”
After a long pause, he said, “I guess not.” It was a lie.
He sensed her eyeing him closely as he maneuvered the car around the piney bends of Pumpkin Lane and the dark towers of downtown Ravenshaft drew ever closer. He kept his gaze fixed on the road ahead and his face as blank as possible, granting her no glimpse of his thoughts and feelings.
“Please, Reynard,” she said after a time, her voice soft and imploring. “Please understand. Everybody has things they prefer to keep secret. It’s not that I don’t trust you or…or anything. It’s just, some things need to be kept secret even from…people close to you. Often especially those people.”
He didn’t respond right away, wasn’t sure if he wanted to respond at all. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her watching him, motionless.
“Yeah, I understand,” he said finally.
“Thank you,” she said in a voice so small and soft the words were nearly whispers.
The rest of the drive back passed in silence. He kept expecting her to ask how he was, or what he had been up to, or if it had been him who stood her up in Nioedo fifteen hundred years ago; but all she did was stare out the windshield at the minute wedge of the world illuminated by the headlights.
He nearly broke the silence himself at one point, when he found himself wondering why she had asked him to help her. Surely she knew countless people who would be willing to drive her somewhere or even loan her their car.
But before he could ask, the answer became clear to him. She had wanted someone she knew well, but who was not a regular part of her life and would therefore not be around very often to ask nosey questions.
His knuckles cracked faintly as his hands tightened on the steering wheel.
When they arrived at the intersection of Zonster and South Scapula, he made a tight U-turn and pulled up alongside the southwest corner in the exact position he had picked her up. The swath of the eastern horizon visible down Zonster’s length had lightened to dark blue, first hint of the coming dawn.
She got out, then leaned in through the open door.
“Thank you again,” she said.
“No problem.” He offered her a bland smile.
She hovered there, watching him, waiting. Her smile wavered. No doubt she was expecting him to ask her if she wanted to stay in touch. He wasn’t going to bother. It wasn’t worth the trouble. At this point all he wanted was to go back to his hotel room and sleep and forget this whole incident.
“Okay, well…” She sounded confused. The smile stretched and quivered a little as she struggled to keep it in place.
There was a long pause.
“I owe you one, Reynard,” she said, leaning farther forward so he would be sure to see the sincerity on her face. “Someday I’ll repay you.”
He repeated his bland smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad I could help.”
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She shut it. She flashed a strained smile.
“Take care,” she said.
“Yeah, you too.”
After another brief pause, as if she expected him to say something more, she stepped back and shut the door.
He made another, more rapid U-turn, tires squealing, and sped off toward his hotel. He didn’t look back.
10
Giv-Golos Repository
9987 A.C.