by Alex Bledsoe
When Zginski reached the Ringside just after sunset, he immediately sensed something wrong. One clue was obvious: the place should’ve been packed, but the parking lot was empty and the CLOSED sign still hung on the front door.
He drove around back and parked in his usual spot. The kitchen door was unlocked. When he opened it he immediately smelled blood, but it took him a moment to identify the peculiar tang to the odor. It was not, he realized, living human blood or the animal scent carried by some of the raw meat. It was unmistakably vampire blood.
He closed the door silently behind him. The odor seemed to come from the women’s lavatory across the narrow hall, so he carefully peered inside.
Something lay in the middle of the floor. It looked like a chunk of animal tissue, perhaps a string of sausage, which had somehow crumbled to dust. He touched one intact section, and it collapsed into black ashlike powder. A similar, smaller lump lay in the sink.
He felt a pit of feeling open inside his own chest. But he resolutely refused to let the thought form. It must be something else.
He went through the empty kitchen to Barrister’s office. None of the appliances were turned on to prepare for the evening. He pushed the swinging doors open, and saw that the chairs were still atop tables in the darkened dining room.
He knocked on the office door and said, “Barrister? It is Zginski.” Without waiting for a reply, he opened it.
Barrister sat behind his desk, head down on his folded arms.
“Barrister?” he repeated, but got no response; the man was under a vampiric spell. “I did it,” a voice said behind him.
He turned. Patience stood there, dressed for work, but with a smear of blackened blood across her pale cleavage. Her expression lacked its normal wry amusement. “First I had him call everyone and tell them not to come in. Then I put him to sleep for a while.”
“Why?” Zginski demanded.
Patience’s voice was quiet and even. “Because Fauvette is dead, Rudy. Really dead.”
Zginski’s world tilted around him, but he did not let it show. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked as she added, “She’s in the basement where no one can disturb her. I knew you’d want to tell her good-bye.”
He followed her down the stairs. The withered thing that had once been Fauvette was laid out on an old wooden door placed atop two beer kegs. A ring of fine dust already outlined the body, and more fell as it slowly crumbled to bits.
Zginski felt as if gravity had tripled beneath him. The three steps to the corpse were the hardest he’d ever taken. The adorable face he’d first seen drinking blood in the back of a pickup truck now consisted of cords of blackened flesh stretched tight over a skull so small it was heartbreaking. The teeth, including her slightly curved fangs, were white and plain through gaps as the cheeks flaked away. Eyes that had gleamed with sadness, desire, hope, and a love he could never acknowledge, were now orbless pits.
Patience remained respectfully at the bottom of the stairs. There was nothing to be done, and Zginski no doubt knew that.
He touched, as lightly as possible, Fauvette’s nearest hand. The skin felt like dry tissue paper that crackled under even the feather-light pressure, and black ash puffed out through a multitude of tiny splits.
Zginski withdrew his fingers and stood silently for a long moment. He asked calmly, “Who did this?”
“My sister,” Patience said. “She did it to hurt me.”
“And why would this hurt you?”
“Somehow she knew I loved Fauvette like a sister more than I ever loved Prudence.”
He turned to her. His voice and demeanor stayed the same, but something terrifying burned in his eyes. “So you drew her into this blood feud between the two of you?”
“Not on purpose, Rudy. I never even told Prudence I was back. I have no idea how she found out.”
“But you knew she was capable of this.”
Patience nodded.
Zginski’s backhand knocked her into the concrete wall so hard it cracked, rupturing a pipe above her. Water cascaded down on them. Stunned, she tried to move away, but her shoes slipped in the water and Zginski caught her by the hair. He pulled her to her feet and hissed, “I will not allow this. You have come into my world and brought destruction. This will not happen again.”
Holding her by the hair, he picked up a discarded wooden chair and smashed it to pieces against the wet floor. He took one of the legs, now jagged and sharp, and raised it over his head.
“No!” Patience screamed and struggled to escape. The rising water was now ankle-deep, and the empty kegs began to float. He slammed her face-first into the wall and pressed her there until she stopped struggling.
“You deserve a slower death for the danger you have brought,” he snarled. “But expediency has granted you mercy.”
He drove the makeshift stake through her back. The jagged point erupted from her chest and buried itself in the wall, pinning her there. She stiffened as long-delayed death immediately seized her. By the time Zginski stepped away, her skin was already withering and turning gray. The water sluicing down on her quickly sheared the collapsing flesh from her skeleton.
Zginski again stood still for a long moment, watching the water dissolve Patience into sludge. A scraping sound made him turn as the kegs supporting Fauvette began to float, and the door fell to one side. Her corpse slid toward the water.
With no thought he rushed over and caught it. The water had the same effect as it did on Patience, and the body fell apart, sifting through his fingers as it dissolved. He clutched at her clothes, the only things that remained. But they were mere empty garments.
The next moment he was driving down Madison, with no memory of leaving the Ringside and getting into his car. But he knew exactly where he was going.
Byron Cocker pounded on the door of the Bolade mansion until Prudence opened it. He started to speak, then did a double take at the beautiful young woman before him. At last he said, “I need to see Mama Prudence.”
She laughed at his discomfort. She wore a low-cut gown and her hair was brushed loose and shiny around her shoulders. “Why, Sheriff, don’t you recognize me?”
He was too distraught for games. “I don’t know who the hell you are but I need to see Mama Prudence! Now!”
She stepped back at this hostility. “Byron Cocker, you will behave like you’ve been to town before or I will send you on your way. What is it you want to see me about?”
His eyes, red and blurred from crying, finally saw the truth. “Mama Prudence?” he said pitifully. “Is that really you?”
“Given your attitude, you may call me ‘Miss Bolade,’ ” she sniffed. “Now state your business.”
With a wailing cry he fell to his knees, his great weight making the floor tremble. Something crashed and broke in another room. He bawled, “My boy is dead!”
She stepped away from him as he blubbered, his red face a contrast to the white scar tissue. “And what is that to me, sir? I certainly didn’t kill him.”
“But you can bring him back! You’re a witch-woman, everybody knows it! My God, look at what you’ve done to yourself!” He gestured at her as if she had somehow missed the fact that she was now young and beautiful.
She laughed coldly. “I’m not a witch, Sheriff. I know a few Gypsy tricks and scams, but that’s all. It’s enough to keep you simple rednecks at arm’s length, and that’s what I need.”
He stared in confusion, mucus running from his nose. Then he crawled on his knees to her and wrapped his huge arms around her waist. “I don’t care what you are, just please, bring back my boy! He’s all I have!”
“And you will join him soon enough,” a new voice said.
Cocker and Prudence both turned. Zginski stood in the still-open doorway. In one hand he clutched a long, jaggedly sharp piece of wood.
“Well, this is a surprise,” Prudence said. “Byron Cocker, this is—”
“We’ve met,” Zginski and Cocker
said simultaneously.
Prudence laughed in delight. “How marvelous.” She took in his bedraggled appearance. “Why, Mr. Zginski, you’re soaking wet.”
Zginski held up the broken chair leg stained with Patience’s blood. “I drove this through the body of your sister. Now I intend to do the same with you.”
Prudence’s eyes opened wide, and all the amusement left her face. “You mean . . . Patience is dead?”
“As you are about to be.”
She shoved Cocker away so hard that he slid across the floor into a side table, dislodging the vases arranged there. Their crash echoed in the foyer. “I don’t believe you!” Prudence hissed.
“Your belief does not concern me,” Zginski snarled. “Your presence has brought danger and destruction to me, and I will end it. And you.”
“No!” Cocker yelled and threw himself at Zginski. His bulk and the element of surprise gave him the momentary advantage. Mama Prudence was his only hope for bringing back his son, and this foreigner, who’d stolen his car out from under him, would not stop him now. He grabbed Zginski’s neck, lifted the smaller man off the floor, and squeezed with all his might.
Zginski’s uppercut hit Cocker’s jaw so hard the rewired mandible shattered like a clay pot. The man’s head snapped back, the bones and muscles in his neck snapping like tent lines in a hurricane. He dropped to the floor, blinked twice, and died.
Zginski pointed at Prudence. “Now you.”
She hid her fear and gave him her sweetest, most demure smile. “Rudy, please. We’re two of a kind. Remember last night? That was freedom, Rudy, a meeting of equals. You can’t pretend you ever got that with my sister, or that silly little Fauvette.”
At the name, Zginski roared his fury and threw the stake, not at her heart, but at her head. It struck below her nose, in the soft cleft above her lips, and stuck out the back of her skull.
The impact made her stumble back into the staircase. She screamed, but the stake distorted the sound into something ghastly. She tried to pull it out, but before she could Zginski snatched her by the wrist, put his other hand against her torso, and ripped her arm from her body.
She pushed him away and careened toward the parlor. He kicked her in the small of the back and sent her crashing across a padded chair into a low coffee table.
She landed facedown and tried to rise one-armed. He planted one foot between her shoulder blades to hold her in place. She made another sound, like a wounded elephant crossed with a shattered boiler.
“You should never,” he said icily, “have drawn so much attention.” Then he crushed her upper chest against the floor, smashing her heart beneath the sole of his platform shoe.
He stepped back and watched yet again as another vampire withered away, this time into a powdery pile of bone fragments and dust.
The fire as the Bolade mansion burned to the ground could be seen for miles, the smoke rising straight and black into the still afternoon sky. And Leonardo, from his vantage point in the forest beside the Crabtree family cemetery, was tempted to investigate. But he would not abandon the fresh unmarked grave. Already he’d chased away two coyotes and a wild pig attracted by the scent of corruption seeping through the dry soil. He would keep watch until the next dawn, to see if Clora Crabtree might rise from her death to join him.
CHAPTER 30
AT THE MOMENT Rudy Zginski ground Prudence Bolade’s heart underfoot, he was solely focused on one thing: vengeance. This purpose was so single-minded that somewhere between Memphis and McHale County, he inadvertently severed his connection to Alisa Cassidy.
She sat at her desk finishing yet another potential translation of a line from the Festa Maggotta. As always this translation, even though it accurately deciphered the individual words, might not be correct if it didn’t make sense when read along with the rest of the passage. And sometimes even coherent passages might be wrong if they failed to mesh with what had gone before. It was one more reason that the book, despite existing for centuries, had never been rendered fully readable. Had old Sir Francis Colby understood the academic aggravation he was creating when he bequeathed it?
The pain struck deep inside with the force of a knife carving clumsily through her midsection. Her scream of surprise and agony was choked by its sheer intensity, and her back arched against her chair. Her hands clawed at the air, and her feet kicked against the desk. She couldn’t get breath to even gasp.
Sometime later she awoke on the floor beside her desk. It was now dark outside. Papers and books lay scattered around her, dislodged by her mad thrashing. The pain was still there, but both duller and more widespread. She managed to sit up, tears running down her face.
This can mean only one thing, she thought. Rudy is dead. Destroyed. He’d never do this to me deliberately.
She used the desk for support as she stood, one hand uselessly cradling her belly. She took several deep breaths and wiped the tears from her eyes. She had made plans for her death based on Rudy’s presence. Now that he was gone, she’d have to change everything.
She looked up as the front door opened and Zginski entered.
She could think of nothing to say. Then she noticed his dishevelment, including unmistakable dark red stains.
She tried to speak. Her throat was so raw she managed only a croak.
Zginski looked up and seemed surprised to find himself there. His eyes opened wide as he realized what he’d done to her, and immediately he enveloped her in a huge surge of power.
In its way, the total cessation of the agony was as bad as the pain itself. Alisa cried out and would have fallen again, but instead managed to land back in her office chair.
She sat gasping, her body alive with sensations that had nothing to do with the torture she’d been experiencing. She began to cry again, and it took several minutes to get herself under control. She blew her nose using a page of scribbled notes, then noticed Zginski had not moved. “Rudy?”
He said nothing. His shoulders sagged, and his long hair hung in loose strands around his face. She’d never seen him any way other than in total control, and this really frightened her. She used the wall for support as she went to him.
She touched his arm. “Rudy, what’s wrong?” Then she looked at the red stain on her hand. “Rudy, is that blood?”
He looked as if he’d been told the worst news in the world. “I apologize for neglecting you,” he said flatly, staring at the floor.
The blood from killing Patience soaked his sleeve and most of his shirt. “Sweet Jesus, what did you do?”
He pushed the hair from his eyes and tucked it behind his ears. “I did . . . what was necessary.”
She backed away from him, her bloody hand out like Lady Macbeth. “Necessary? You told me you didn’t have to kill people to feed, that a little blood from me was enough!”
“No, you misunderstand. Most of those I killed were fellow revenants.”
“Most?”
He finally raised his eyes and looked at her. “I did kill one man. Byron Cocker.”
“You killed Byron Cocker?” Alisa gasped. “My God, you are crazy. You are truly insane.”
He should have taken offense, but he had no reserves of outrage left in him. He said calmly, “I assure you, each decision was made quite rationally, and there is no way to trace the events back to me. That, in fact, was the point.”
She backed into the wall and dislodged a picture of her with Chad. The glass shattered when the frame struck the floor. “Stay away from me, Rudy. I’d rather have the pain than this.”
He swallowed hard. The terror in her eyes, where previously he’d seen only kindness, desire, and understanding, made him feel somehow weak. She was the second person to demand his absence that day. “Alisa, I assure you, it was nothing that could be avoided. Had I not acted, the danger would have only grown. Fauvette . . .” The name choked him and he could not continue.
“Who?” she asked.
Of course she didn’t know. He never mentioned the others
to her. “A friend.”
“A vampire?”
He nodded. “She was . . .” And something wrenched in his heart, a surge of emotion he neither expected nor knew how to handle. “She was beautiful, and kind, and now she is dead.”
He sat on the foyer’s tile floor, his legs too weak to hold him. He stared down at a spot where light reflected from one bit of texture. The room was silent except for the air conditioner and the occasional traffic.
At last Alisa said in wonder, “Oh, my God, Rudy. You loved her. Like a human being.”
Zginski continued to gaze at the floor. “Yes.”
Alisa took a tentative step toward him. “And you never told her.”
“No.”
She laughed at the absurdity. “You son of a bitch. You come off like some icy death machine, and you were in love all the time.”
He looked up. “I never lied about my feelings for you, Alisa.”
“I know you didn’t. You don’t lie, you just paraphrase to your own advantage.”
“No, I will lie if it suits me. But I have not lied to you.”
She knelt and touched his cold face. Once she’d known a German shepherd who was vicious beyond belief until a car struck him and broke his leg. Zginski’s numb acquiescence reminded her of that dog’s blank, cowed expression. “I know you haven’t, Rudy. It must hurt you a lot if it’s left you like this. Is there anything I can do?”
“There is nothing to be done. She is dead. The ones responsible for her death are dead. All evidence has been destroyed. It is over.”
She paused, weighing the benefits of silence against Zginski’s visible anguish. Her plan was logically idiotic, and had been developed for something else entirely, a contingency against her own cowardice. But now there was a chance to turn it to a selfless use that, if she were lucky enough to face St. Peter, might count in her favor. Helping the damned was surely as meritorious as feeding the poor.
Carefully, making sure each word was clear, she said, “I might be able to help you.”