by Cas Martin
Perhaps it was that same instinct in her, the killer, which made her reach down and take the pendant that lay on the floor, glittering on the pavement where Jasoum's head would have been if it was still attached to his body. His eyes, lifeless but open, watched her from six feet away, as she reached down and picked it up, feeling its reassuring weight in her hand.
The pendant served as a reminder she had a job to do here. It also made her vulnerable. People knew her now, would be on the lookout for her. Monica had known she was here, so it stood to reason that other families would too. How could they not? Despite all the in-fighting and dislike that existed, they still had to protect their species against the bigger, greater, enemy. They would not have remained so largely undetected over the past two millennia without some kind of sense of self-preservation.
Monica did not seem to think of her as the enemy, but Elizabeth suspected she was in the minority. The two of them seemed to have come from the same place; thrust into a spotlight they never saw coming and a role neither of them had ever planned for. That didn't mean she could rely on Monica to protect her if she ventured out into the city alone at night. She would be a walking target.
Elizabeth sighed. She was going nowhere tonight, but if she wanted to in the future, she really needed to get some work done. She needed to familiarise herself with the city, a sprawling metropolis that only America could provide. It was nothing like the European cities that had been the initial focus of her adventure. They had felt safer and more like home to her. It was something more than language. After all, America should feel like a safer place than old walls of Romania if that was the case. No, it was the weight of thousands of years of culture that called out to her. Sometimes, there was no doubt that her father's blood ran through her veins.
Earlier that day, after she had left David and Monica, she had wandered the city, knowing that she was safe for a few hours. She wasn't so sure she was safe from other humans though, and her irrational fear of getting shot was always there. She pounded the pavements, eyes peeled for landmarks that would act as markers should she end up on the run, but with the city rising so high, she was limited by what the landscape naturally offered her.
She poured a stiff drink, pushing that little nagging voice to the back of her mind when it once again told her she was drinking far too much, and added another dash to the glass in defiance. Sitting at the hotel desk, she started to put her papers back in order from where she had scattered them this afternoon. The notes were her own that she had made since arriving in New York. She stared at the scribbles, starting to become as messy as her father's had been.
When she had first gone through his notes, she had begun to see that the act of writing it all down had kept track more than just the facts. It had captured his actual thought process more so than any computer programme could ever do. The pages in his own hand showed where he had crossed out one chain of thought and moved off onto another. The additions, linked with arrows, revealed a later thought or informational find. A newly inserted paragraph in a word processing document captured no such moments of revelation.
Next to her papers lay a selection of maps and guidebooks. Nothing that marked her out of the ordinary as a tourist in a foreign city. Yet they were her lifeline and her tools. That very afternoon she had circled the club that Monica now owned on her pocket map. It was obvious that this would be one of the centres of vampire activity in the city, and she wondered just how far apart other such places would have to be.
She opened the laptop, typed in all the pre-requisite passwords to give her full access to the hard drive and its contents, and then did a search across all of the databases for the history of Monica's family. She took a sip of her drink and settled in for a long night.
The databases all pulled up a vast amount of detail. This was why she had needed to catalogue it all. There was so much information it was impossible for her brain to hold it. Not to mention that there was such a diverse spectrum of fact, fiction and speculation, it was hard to keep track of which category it fell under.
It was clear that her father had spent a lot of time gathering information on this particular family. They were well documented in his notes, and much of it Elizabeth could tell had come straight from the source, rather than speculation or remote investigation. He had clearly built up a rapport with someone in the inner circle. If Monica was to be believed, that could have been the previous head himself. If that was the case then the information was likely to fall under the 'fact' heading than anything else. Her eyes scanned the screen, trying to pick out the salient points of what she needed to know.
It seemed that Monica's family had come from Middle-Europe originally, not North America. Elizabeth knew her father had nothing factual on an indigenous North American family. She didn't know if it was because they had been better at keeping themselves a secret, or whether they had been inadvertently wiped out by the arrival of the Europeans all those years ago. Instead, Monica's family had been the most influential and powerful when they had been in Europe, and that was a tradition they had brought with them to America.
Their main strength came from the fact that they were almost human, certainly on the outside. They were reasonable, educated, wealthy; all the things that came in handy when you wanted to survive and thrive in the human world. Monica's tolerance of sunshine earlier still nagged at Elizabeth's brain. Perhaps that was why her father had been so fascinated by this particular family. That other than the icky blood drinking factor, he thought they were the same as us. It certainly gelled with the impression she had got from Monica.
Monica was not a typical example of the family she belonged to though. There were certain privileges that came with being the leader of any family, a strength that was tied to the power they held. It was something Elizabeth wasn't entirely comfortable with. She liked to deal in hard facts and figures, known truths, no matter how unpalatable they may be. All the mystical stuff just didn't sit well with her. It came from nowhere and could not be explained, which meant it could not be predicted. Things that could not be predicted could not be planned for.
And not planning for things got you killed.
Yet Monica had been able to walk through the midday heat and meet her in the café, without any discernible signs of sun effects. She knew from her time tracking Jasoum that he and his family shunned the daylight with a passion. Elizabeth had tried to test Monica and she had stepped up to the mark.
Elizabeth was sure Monica must have been doing something to provide enhanced protection, but what? Closing her eyes, Elizabeth sat back in her chair and willed her mind to relax, gently thinking back to her meeting with Monica earlier that day. It was a technique of recall that she had been practicing over the years, coming from her original attempts to meditate and conquer the insomnia that had plagued her after her father's death. It had become a useful tool, and she believed that using it consciously like this would ultimately make her power of recall better if she ever found herself in another one of those split second 'life or death' moments.
In her mind's eye she pictured Monica sitting in front of her and allowed herself to wander over the scene her imagination laid out in front of her. Experience told her that she would recall the most obvious things first, before her brain allowed her to get down to the nitty-gritty details.
Monica's wry smile sat at the front of her thoughts, Elizabeth questioning whether or not the other woman was laughing at her, humouring her, or just showing genuine warmth. It was hard to imagine elongated teeth behind that smile, and Elizabeth's heart sped up in a natural fear response to what Monica really was, no matter what she looked like on the surface or how well she hid it. She forced her breathing to slow and her mind to relax again, even though there was a degree of satisfaction to knowing that her body responded correctly to a threat that she could face at any time.
With her mind and body back under her control, she tried to recall the specifics of the meeting. Unbidden, the smell of coffee filled her senses, an
d her stomach made an involuntary rumble of appreciation. Monica's eyes were in front of her, a startling blue that stopped her from being entirely human. Now, using only what was buried in her subconscious to guide her, she was able to see what she had missed during the actual time they had spent together. The blue of the woman's eyes seemed far too deep, and the black of her pupils had an unnatural shade. It was the black of facing death on a cold winter's night. Again Elizabeth's body shuddered and she attempted to shut down the reflex before it fully kicked in.
Piece by piece Elizabeth allowed her mind to roam over the woman in front of her, noticing the discreet pair of earrings — instantly ruled out as being too new to be an ancient symbol of her heritage, but very nice nonetheless — and her necklace, until Elizabeth recalled Monica's first sip of her coffee.
On her index finger was a ring. It was gold, but not new gold. It was an old gold, deep and orange, not entirely pure and refined, forged in a simple European style. A ring? Really? Who did this woman think she was, Frodo? Buried in it was a stone of some sort, but try as she might, Elizabeth's mind would not recall any more detail than that. She could only recall what she had actually seen, she knew that, but it was still frustrating. Still, it was a strong candidate for the family heirloom.
Standing up to look out of her hotel room window, she knew she had an uphill battle ahead. The retrieval of her father's journals was much more than keeping them out of the wrong hands. It was personal. They had been a part of her father, his private thoughts as well as his quest for understanding in this strange world she had found herself in. Those thoughts and feelings, including those that he had recorded in his final hours of being alive, they belonged to her and no one else. She was prepared to fight for them, prepared to kill for them if she had to. Which was something that she was reluctant to admit.
To do so would also be to admit that killing Jasoum was more than a one-off. It had altered some tiny part of her soul, and telling herself that it was okay because he was not human, because he was a murdering monster, did little to salve her conscience.
15
From two rooms away, Monica could actually feel the music kick up a notch. The increase in volume told her it had gone past 2am and into the party hour.
This was the time that the younger vamps would start to relax, able to kick back now that the older ones had left. The club was a spiritual home for the entire family, so it had to cater to all of them. The older ones tended to leave earlier, having developed their own routines over the years. The older you became, the more you savoured the rituals and the slow build to a feed.
Her head was pounding, a slow throb that came and went in time with the music. She had a conference call tomorrow with a sister company in Hong Kong, and she was going to need to be hands on and attentive. Which was about a million miles away from where she was feeling right now.
Only Dennis remained with her. Even he seemed lost in thought, a respectful distance away. She knew he had his own problems, and by being her closest advisor, was juggling two equally difficult jobs. Without him she would have stopped keeping her head above water by now and sunk without a trace.
Worse, she could feel the hunger rising in her, yet going on a hunt just seemed too much trouble. She didn't have a regular person, like so many of her peers. Some of the older ones even had multiple people they could go to in an hour of need. She had never really had anyone on a regular basis. Much as she hated to admit it and would never voice it to anyone else, it just seemed kind of cheap. Like she would be using them.
She swirled the remains of the wine in the glass in front of her, then drained it in one swallow. The food and drink that had been provided tonight had failed to satisfy that base need in her, and she knew that she would not make it through another twenty-four hours without a feed. It must be all the extra stress she was under bringing it out in her. The one thing in her life that Monica was secretly proud of was the control she had over her hunger. Taming it was not something that the family advocated.
Their bloodline had never been ashamed of what it was. They had all been groomed into allowing their natures to be free. Being free did not mean that you had to be careless and get caught. Being free did not mean that you had to lose control and kill during a feed. It did not mean rampages and frenzy, and some of those other things that they were taught to despise the other families for. It meant you indulged yourself without guilt or remorse. That you could have compassion, and pleasure and joy, but freedom of feeding also meant freedom of being, and there were rules and regulations that made that possible.
As she put her glass back down on the table, she realised Dennis was looking at her, his face questioning.
'I'm okay,' she snapped, then instantly regretted it.
'I never said you weren't.'
'You were giving me that look.'
'What look?'
'That look you give me when you're trying to work out what I'm thinking or feeling.'
'Can you blame me? It's been a crazy day, and you've been sitting there eating in silence, and I have no idea where we're going to.'
'And you think that I do?'
'No, which is why I'm giving you 'that' face. I'm not worried that we haven't got it all worked out yet, but I am worried that other people will realise that we haven't.' He glanced towards the closed door. 'Things were pretty tight in here tonight. If it hadn't have been for old man Elverez, they would've started hauling your ass over the coals.'
'Don't you think I don't know that?'
'Of course I do. I just wonder where we're going to find a solution. I'm being your friend here, not just your PA. This isn't some damage limitation exercise I'm trying to manage. It's a real situation. You've hardly said a word about your meeting with Miss Hastings.'
'Elizabeth.'
'I'll call her Elizabeth when she tells me I can, not you. I'm not going to fall into the trap of forgetting who she is.'
'You think she's a threat?'
'It's more the fact that you already don't.'
'I never said that.'
'You didn't have to. I know you well enough to know when you let your guard down. Largely because it doesn't happen very often.'
'I can't help that I never prepared for this and let's face it, they're not that willing to help me.' Monica gestured to where the elders had previously been sitting.
'I'd go so far to say they are very much fighting against you. Or at least, letting you coast on your own to see where you'll end up. It's not fair and it's not meant to be this hard.'
'I thought it was just me.'
'No, I've definitely noticed it too. I think it's confusion and jealousy, but they seem to be forgetting the golden rules that they've spent their whole lives shoving down our throats. All about the family and the greater good and all that crap. Now they've got a bit of hurt pride, and it's taking over. I thought we were supposed to be bigger and better than this?'
'Me too,' Monica replied miserably. Part of her wanted to just quit, let them have the position and responsibility they so obviously craved. 'I just wish I could get them on side.'
'I'm not sure it's going to be that easy. Perhaps that's why you were chosen. Perhaps we're about to enter a time when the rule book is out of the window, and we need a leader that can wing it on her own? Have you ever considered that?'
'Considered it? I don't have a clue why 'so called' Destiny picked me. I thought most of it was all just to keep some kind of order, you know, a little bit of social structure. I thought that the big boys would have the power, we'd all benefit from it, and I was happy with that.'
'Now you know just how real it is.'
'Damn right I do. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.'
'Nor me,' Dennis agreed. 'Anything else on your mind?'
'Like what?'
'I dunno, but you look kind of hungry tonight.'
'I am.'
'That's not like you.' His eyebrows knitted together in confusion and worry.
'What?'
'Well, I've been keeping your calendar for a while now, like any self-respecting PA does, and you've had a feed in the past two days already. So it's a little bit soon for Miss 'self-denial-makes-me-a-better-person' to want to feed again.' He paused so she could stick her tongue out at him. She couldn't argue. 'But the strange thing is actually seeing it there on your face. You usually keep that kind of stuff hidden.'
'Is it really that obvious?'
'I'm afraid so.'
'Damn it. I can't believe that this whole thing is getting to me that much. I should know better. I should be able to control it better.'
'You can't be expected to cope with all this without showing some signs of tension. You're not super-human Monica. Cut yourself some slack. Maybe you should go out tonight, have a feed, have some fun and let your hair down for awhile.'
'I can't even remember what it feels like to relax.'
'Well, why don't you go somewhere new and different, forget who you are for a night? I'll hold the fort and field any calls for you. I promise I'll get in touch if anything major comes up,' he added when he saw her hesitation.
'It's tempting.'
'The offer's there. Tomorrow's a big day. That call is going to be stressful. And that's just work. Everything else is going to be difficult for awhile too, and there's no point in pretending that it isn't. You need to be as in control of everything as much as you can be, and if you're spending all your energy fighting the need to feed, then you're just going to fall down at every other hurdle.'
'I suppose.'
'You know that I'm right. You owe this much to yourself. Screw everybody else.'
'I know you're right. It's just that some things are easier said than done.' She stood and picked up her bag. 'Thank you Dennis.'
'What for?'
'Talking some sense into me when no one else can. As usual. You're right about what I need. It may not be what I want right now, but I need to make sure I'm at the top of my game.'