Hatred suddenly drained, white face clouded with uncertainty, Alicia took an unconscious step backward, red eyes fixed on something over my shoulder. Above the buzz of the crowd, I detected a steady, rhythmic chopping sound somewhere in the sky behind us.
Mitzi and I turned quickly, following Alicia’s frozen stare, but The Count remained smiling at the vampire queen.
Above the glow of jack-o-lanterns at the far end of the roof, I could just make out the shimmering belly of a large metallic object emerging deliberately out of the blackness. A helicopter. It hovered there confidently, a steel dragonfly, its rotors beating the convention tables, rattling plastic axes and chains, whipping pages of stacked comic books.
But it was the tall, silent figure standing on the ledge of the roof below the chopper that most caught my attention. A man.
But more--I knew instinctively--than merely that.
I heard Alicia’s black heels click another reflexive step backward.
“Ivan…” she whispered drily.
TWENTY-ONE
“Is that the Ivan?” I whispered to The Count. Not sure why it seemed necessary to whisper, just a feeling about the air.
But I’m also not sure why The Count was no longer beside me.
I turned a circle but he was gone. I spotted Clancy, sprawled on the convention floor, and reached out with my mind.
“Clancy? Are you in there?”
Down the aisle, struggling to her feet, Clancy came back wearily inside my head. “I’m here. Most of me anyway. Where’d the old man go?”
“Never mind the old man. The young man is here.”
“Who?”
“Ivan the terrible. Just arrived by bat copter.”
“Not the—“
“From the look on Alicia’s face here beside me I’d say yes. Also she seems to have lost complete interest in you for the moment.”
“In me? What does she want with me?”
“Your body,” Mitzi interrupted.
“I meant other than my death.”
“Your body,” Mitzi repeated. “Can you make it to the elevators?”
I saw her stumble a drunken half-circle, a trickle of blood and some scratches on her legs and temple. “I think so. If I limp.”
“Limp,” I commanded urgently.
“What about you two? Are you coming?”
I turned warily to Alicia. She no longer seemed aware of me, eyes still glued to the tall figure on the edge of the roof. Unlike Alicia he was, I could see now, blonde, thick hair parted by the rotor winds above. He looked almost like a muscular surfer boy except for his dress: black shirt, black slacks, black shoes. The only thing not black on him was the silver chain about his neck. Silver!
“Ed? Are you coming?”
“That depends, sweetie, on Alicia’s next move. A while back she was offering my freedom.”
“In exchange for what?” Clancy asked tightly.
“Yes,” I told her.
“Shit.”
“Just get to the elevators,” Mitzi was saying, brushing past me and heading quickly that way. I half-expected Alicia to turn and blast her but she didn’t. So I took a tentative step that way myself.
“Alicia….” It was Ivan’s voice. You couldn’t have missed it. Slithery soft and piercingly sharp at the same time. Inhuman. “It’s a long time now. How have you been?”
“Tolerable, Ivan. And yourself?”
“Quite well, thank you. Busy.”
And I saw a strange smile ply Alicia’s beautifully features. I took another step toward the elevators. I think I knew even then I wasn’t going to make it.
“Nice necklace, Ivan.”
“Thank you.”
“Silver paint?”
“No. The real thing. There have been advances in Chicago.”
Alicia smiled wider. “Impressive. You have been busy.”
“You too. Thanks for the lotion, by the way.”
Alicia took a small sideways step across the aisle; slight but purposeful. “You may have noticed it wasn’t successful.”
From a hundred feet away I heard Ivan’s awful chuckle. “Oh, it will be. Once we take out the dog pee.”
Alicia hesitated. “Dog pee.” She almost turned to look back at Mitzi by the elevators—then let it go. “Well! Your people work very fast!”
“Growing exponentially, thank you.”
She’d almost sidled to one of the dealers’ tables now flanking the aisle. I hadn’t the least idea what she was up too. I was too busy backing step by careful step to join Clancy and Mitzi at the elevator doors.
“So,” Alicia inquired politely, “what else can we do for you this lovely night?”
For a moment I thought Ivan wasn’t going to answer. Then: “The girl, of course. I want her.”
Alicia’s hip brushed the edge of the dealer’s table. It didn’t contain the usual Goth paraphernalia, just a few cardboard boxes and what looked like a stack of receivers or audio equipment.
“What girl would that be, Ivan dear?”
“Please, Alicia, games? Must we?”
Alicia’s turn to chuckle. “Oh! Of course! The comely Miss Cummings. Ivan, dear, really--you’ve had better. Far better. Me, for instance.”
Ivan returned a small shrug. “At one time, maybe. But I’m afraid, my queen, you are no longer the fairest in all the land.”
A blush of humiliation tinted Alicia’s white cheeks. But she held the smile. “Well. The grass is always greener, eh Ivan? Fine. It’s your funeral. Miss Cummings is right over by the elevators. I don’t think she’s going anywhere until her boyfriend there joins her. And probably not even then, am I right?”
“I did jamb the circuitry, yes.”
Alicia tossed up her hands. “Well! There you go! You’ve covered all the bases! Here. Let me call her for you…”
She reached across the table and grabbed what looked like a hand mike from the stack of consoles. She hit the PA switch.
“Ladies and Gentleman!” her voice boomed out over the crowd. “A special treat! One of the biggest stars of vampirism has just graced us with a last minute appearance. Please direct your attention to the rear of the convention floor and let’s give it up for the star of the incredible Twilight series of films, the unbearably handsome, the one and only—Robert Pattinson!”
The collective scream that followed was so all-consumingly piercing I’m sure I was robbed of several decibels. Every costumed female on the roof lost her mind and bladder and rushed hysterically from every quarter of the convention floor at Ivan’s confused figure atop the rampart. It reminded me of one of those National Geographic specials on army ants attacking an invading bug. Tables overturned, papers flew, vendors yelled and cursed. For a moment some of the opposing True Blood fans stood their ground in a whirl of indecision--before they too stampeded, shrieking and foaming, for someone none of them had the least idea was a genuine vampire. He did sort of look like that guy Pattinson, I guess, from the few pictures I’d seen of the actor…and it was fairly dark up there on the roof. In any case it was too late; when that kind of female estrogen is set in motion it’s like the Red Sea closing over the trapped Egyptians.
“Well,” Mitzi remarked as I joined her and Clancy at the elevators, “now I guess we know how Elvis felt.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Alicia remarked, abruptly beside us, “Elvis had it all over that wannabe. I did him once, you know…”
The three of us were backed up against the unopened doors. “Elvis was a vampire?”
Alicia turned smugly to me. “I said did him, not bit him!” And she went a little misty there for a moment. “Those southern boys…”
Then she grabbed Clancy by the wrist—the kind of grab that said she’d never let go.
Clancy winced pain. Mitzi growled.
“Keep that rat-terrier off me,” Alicia warned, “or I’ll break Miss Cumming’s lovely neck!”
“I’m a poodle!” Mitzi barked, but I doubt Alicia caught it.
�
�Very cute!” a voice boomed from the other end of the roof.
We all turned at the same time to see a stone-faced Ivan lift his arms high above the bobbing heads and frenzied claws of his hysterical ‘fans.’ His fingers twitched once.
--and the next moment his “fans”—along with every other costumed conventioneer—were lying on their backs in a smiling heap as if simultaneously struck by an overwhelming swoon.
Mitzi’s nose twitched admiration. “Forget Elvis, this guy is good!”
In the next instant that “guy” covered the two hundred feet of convention floor in a blink and appeared before us smiling pure evil. Smiling especially at a very startled, very wide-eyed Clancy. She looked a little—what’s the word—mesmerized?
“Miss Cummings,” in a voice that would melt butter, “I cannot tell you what an honor this is! I’ve heard so much about you! Nothing, however, that even begins to describe your beauty!”
Oh, brother. And get this: he actually bowed formally, took her free hand and kissed her fingertips. I mean, the gall of this guy! Pure corn! Funny thing was, he managed to pull it off.
Clancy certainly thought so.
You could see it in her eyes. “I…”
The tall, handsome boy from Chicago pressed a long-nailed finger gently to my heretofore girlfriend’s lips. “Sh! Don’t break the spell of so magical a moment! Unless it’s to tell me you’ve consented to be my queen!”
I looked at Clancy—who didn’t meet my eyes—so I looked back at Ivan. “Say, what?”
Remember grade school? Or maybe church, or say a funeral—when you just know you’ve spoken out of turn?
Ivan turned slowly toward me, blue movie star eyes (remember Paul Newman?) just beginning to go scarlet.
“N-No!” from Clancy, still holding his hand, but blinking back to us a sec. “You mustn’t harm him! Or the dog! Promise me!”
The flames faded in glamor boy’s irises. He turned beatifically back to little Clancy. “Whatever you say, dearest. I am yours to command. Your friends are free to go…”
And the elevator doors slid open behind us.
“You go straight to hell!” Alicia hissed, jerking Clancy from him with her other wrist. The doors slid shut again quickly.
Ivan just stood there smiling commandingly a moment. “I think you know, fair Alicia, I’ve already been!”
And he was on her, clawed hand to her throat, slamming her so hard against the doors they actually bent inward under the impact. I couldn’t believe it. She didn’t even resist. I think it was the first time I ever saw the vampire queen go utterly helpless.
Nor did she struggle; she just cast terrified eyes on Clancy and managed a strangled, imploring plea. “Clan-see!”
Ivan got right in her face then, pressed her deeper into the groaning steel door. “She’s no longer yours to command, little small town queen! Miss Cummings is mine alone now! We’re going to do great things together, Earth-changing things, Universe altering things--none of which involve failure or incompetence--or any of those talents you seem to excel at of late!”
Alicia groaned agony. Even I felt a little sorry for her.
But Mitzi was a sudden blur at the corner of my vision.
The next thing I knew she’d fastened her fangs on Ivan’s ankle.
Mr. Matinee Idol hardly flinched. But he did look down at the dog a distracted moment. It must have been all Alicia needed.
Then I saw something I’ll remember the rest of my life, something so astonishing I was sure at the last few weeks had all been some fantastic dream. Alicia shot straight upward. Like a rocket. Up and out of Ivan’s grasp and into the warm night air…
…up and up to mingle with the stars fifty feet above the hotel rooftop, light and unerring as a stealth fighter, sweeping to a graceful arc, dress fluttering, stopping to hover above us in the night breeze, raven hair flagging, eyes twin carbuncles so bright they lit her pale cheeks and gleaming fangs a soft cherry red. She looked entrancing; a lovely, dark fairy.
But she didn’t sound like one.
Her voice—or something’s voice—resonated somewhere deep within her…or perhaps from somewhere else altogether. Somewhere hot and unpleasant, I thought.
“Take the bitch then! Take her all the way back to the nether regions if she’s so hot and screw her aging human corpus on the shores of the river Styx! But never mistake again who rules the upper regions!”
And hovering there sublimely, an elegant, ebon moth, she raised both pale hands on high again and slammed them downward stiff-armed at the couple on the roof. A bright comet of fire exploded from her fingers and descended on the pair like a cosmic trail of death.
Clancy screamed, her fear-stricken face lit unearthly by the approaching fireball.
I opened my mouth in warning but nothing came out.
Mitzi let go the vampire’s ankle and scooted out of the line of fire with a yelp.
Ivan just stood there doing nothing. Smiling at Clancy.
He shook his head sadly at Alicia at the last moment. Then—a bare instant before the flames struck—drew his cape across Clancy’s head and shoulders. The flaming missile exploding atop them in a crescendo of sparks that made momentary daylight of the rooftop. And then it winked out. As if snuffed.
I looked down at Mitzi. “Vampire can throw fireballs? Since when?”
“Recently, I’d say,” she replied, eyes on the sky.
Ivan bent like a southern gentleman of old again and kissed Clancy’s knuckles. “You must excuse me, my dear, for the briefest moment! I shan’t be long.” Who wrote this guy’s dialogue?’ Shan’t.
Then he just vanished.
Or appeared to.
In reality we looked up to find two figures in the night sky now, floating several cautious yards apart against the glow of distant cityscape. Each was smiling at the other. But I think I knew even then, Ivan’s was the more confident grin.
“We don’t have to do this, Alicia,” his voice echoed down to us. “It’s a stupid, nonsensical and wholly useless waste of both our times.”
Alicia drifted gracefully with the breeze like a black, long-legged swimmer riding the ethers. “Really, Ivan? Don’t we? If not now, then when? I think we both know this was inevitable. I certainly did!”
Ivan hovered a thoughtful moment, twenty feet across from her. Finally nodded. “Inevitable, perhaps, but also a little sad, I think. Don’t you?”
Alicia shook a smirking head. “Dear Ivan. My brightest pupil! My most energetic lover! I believe, on draining you, I left an errant drop of human sentiment! My apologies, handsome boy! You’ll never win a war against humanity with that!”
“Maybe, sweet mentor, that’s why you left it? An attempt to weaken me? Ever the forward thinking Alicia!”
And the dark lady laughed then, high and long. And hurled a thunderbolt of fire at her former student.
Which Ivan swept away one-handed like swatting a fly.
Alicia chuckled her deliciously evil chuckle. “Why are you holding back, dearest? Don’t you know—“
--and was hit so blindingly fast with a stream of pure energy, she shot skyward for what seemed half a mile…hung dazedly at the apex of her arc a moment, before tumbling back to us like a living torch to crash explosively amid the convention tables.
“He’s killed her…” Mitzi’s numbed thoughts filled my mind.
“I don’t think so,” I told her.
But grim and all-business now, Ivan hardly allowed his opponent to struggle up on her hands again on the singed floor before loosening another deadly blast. It caught Alicia in the chest and drove her backward like a projectile through five convention tables before coming to rest in a pile of kindling and twisted limbs.
And lay still.
“No!”
The sound cracked inside my skull like a falling hammer, singular and infuriated. I looked down, saw Mitzi gathering herself.
“Mitzi!”
Only this time she didn’t hesitate or shrink back li
ke a good dog before her master.
“Don’t be a fool!” I cried. “You can’t even approach that kind of power!”
Clancy bent to the poodle’s raised hackles, her voice even with sensibility. “He’s right, Mitz. Stay with us. We need you. Ed needs you.”
Eighty feet across small craters of burning roof, Ivan swept downward again, lighting lightly a few yards from the sprawled vampire queen. He approached her unmoving form with the slightest list of swagger. “I warned you, dear teacher! I told you—“
And Alicia snapped both arms at him—twin fireballs shrieking into the night. They caught Ivan off-guard, drove him back thirty feet or more to the head of a deep-gouged runnel in the hotel roof, fireflies of sparks chasing him, cascading everywhere, starting yet more pockets of fire. In the distance we could hear the first mournful wail of police sirens, the barking of fire engine claxons.
“Come on!” I yelled, leaping to an overturned table where an unconscious—and still star-struck smiling girl—was about to be engulfed by spreading flames.
I got my hands under limp arms and pulled her from the fire’s dancing path, its heat beating hungrily against my face. “Help the others!” I yelled behind me, but Clancy and Mitzi were already pulling slumped forms from the necklace of small bonfires that were sprouting now like red flowers across the convention floor.
I dropped my unconscious burden before the buckled elevator doors and jammed hopefully again at the “down” button. It was the only way off the roof. Save leaping…
I jammed again and again until my thumb knuckle gave painfully. “Come on!”
The doors refused to budge.
A thunderous impact sounded behind me like canon fire: I could feel it through my feet.
I whirled to find a torn and bleeding Alicia lying splayed across a small mountain of bricks from the chimney Ivan had just hurled her against. This time he didn’t wait for her to rally.
What followed became quickly sickening.
Ivan, enraged and beyond mercy now, raised his talons again and again, releasing bolts of energy and flame that tossed Alicia around the roof like a flailing doll. After a time, so pitiful was the sight, I think I might have actually waded into the fray if I hadn’t been so exhausted hauling and dumping young people from the increasing pools of flame. Another ten minutes and the roof would be a total holocaust. As it was I could barely see through the roiling waves of smoke, my stinging vision blurring gelatinously. Clancy worked furiously a few yards away frantically trying to retrieve victims, sometimes beating at their ignited costumes with her bare hands before dragging them to safety. Or what remained of swiftly shrinking safety.
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