I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)

by Tony Monchinski

  Elizaveta could not stand his presence. Her grandmother would invite the louse over in the afternoons and leave them unattended, bidding the servants accord them their privacy, the old dowager hoping to firm up some bond between the two that would culminate in matrimony some few years hence. The boy was boorish and impertinent, a coxcomb to boot. His play on those afternoons—where he would importune and very often nearly molest her—crossed every conceivable line of propriety, verging into sadism and the sexually malapropos. His name—why I remember this is beyond my ken—was Boris. Elizaveta related these tales to me, and I quickly had heard enough. There was but one course for beloved Boris.

  We conspired to address her predicament. I trusted Elizaveta to carry out her deception in the daylight hours as I rested, gathering my strength. Every night we met and she informed me of her progress. I listened and offered advice to further draw Boris into our web. Our scheme laid and developed, Elizaveta lured her intended to the river one night. I am not certain of the pretense that brought the louse from his parents’ estate, though I can imagine. I left those details to Elizaveta and her feminine cunning, which even at ten was quite well developed.

  The boy arrived on the banks of the Neva where specified, no doubt libidinous, anticipating some sexual foray.

  Instead he found me.

  I still remember his words as I approached him, Be gone rebenok. Calling me a child, because I appeared to him then as such. Much was his surprise when I sank my fangs deep. I killed him slowly, muffling his protestations, draining him there in the shadows besides the river. Elizaveta stood at my side and observed all, undisturbed. That Boris was aware of her presence and culpability in his final moments seemed only just to me, somehow poetic.

  We disposed of the body in the river, letting the current carry it out to the Baltic.

  Elizaveta had born witness to all, had participated in my actions to the extent that she had delivered her intended to my clutches. With approval she had watched, even encouraging me with her praise. She had seen how I took my repast and accepted me for what I was. Oh, my Elizaveta! To her I was able to reveal all, even the secrets of my existence.

  Previously I had been enamored.

  From that moment she was my obsession.

  An ordering principal in a universe that lacked order, a meaning to my existence. Elizaveta: my center and my whole. She who accepted me for what I was. More than accepted: she extolled my nature. I pledged myself to her, my being. I vowed to be with her always. Imbrued at that moment with the optimism of youth. Woe that I should know then what I came to learn. There are some vows beyond our power to see to fruition.

  Such is the nature of promises we are ill-equipped to make, much less keep.

  Boris was certainly missed. A cry and hue went up about the city in the days following; again, he was the child of a family of means. Elizaveta made a show of despondency for the proper audience: her grandmother, the boy’s family. Her role in his abrupt disappearance was never supposed. Petersburg society held that the loss was as much hers as Boris’ parents and siblings. At night we laughed about our ruse.

  When the White Nights of June arrived, nights when the sun barely set, Elizaveta came to me.

  The summer gave to the fall, the fall to the terrible winter, and one year to another. Years passed, my Elizaveta matured, and we were impartable after dark. On many a night she accompanied me as I fed. I derived my sustenance from tramps, from would-be ruffians and peasants unlucky enough to be out so late. Elizaveta was, in turn, inevitably aghast, not at the violence—no!—but that I should feed off those so mean in position.

  Very early on, she offered herself to me. I resisted the urge at first. It was, I assure you, no minor temptation. Many were the days I lay in rest, imagining her taste. Many the night we were reunited, I held myself back. I wanted nothing more than to taste her, to drink of her being as only one of my kind can. She insisted and persisted to do so.

  My will was weak, my desire strong.

  Finally I succumbed to the temptation. I found her blood to be the sweetest of nectars. It sated the deep-rooted hunger from which I suffered. I drank long and deep, forcing myself off my Elizaevta less I permanently debilitate her, or worse.

  Of course, I knew her in other ways as well. I refer here to the physical; the biblical sense as it is sometimes said. Again, the details would only sully what we felt for one another, and you would make a mockery of our love.

  Elizaveta could not resist time as I. The years passed and she grew into a beautiful young woman. We continued to appear in public together. To passersby I was little brother to her older sister, then nephew to her young aunt. For my physical appearance changed little in those years. Her lustrous black hair fell to her waist. Her green eyes reflected more than pure beauty by then; wisdom was in them, though only we were wise to our relationship.

  There were other suitors of course: the heir to a maritime fortune; the son of a government official; the male progeny of a variety of Petersburg’s well-to-do. Alas and alack, each fell to consumption or ague, to some cachexy, a gradual atrophy, some fatal ailment. Of course, the cause of their demise was all my doing. Some I took to my cellar, manacled. There I drank from them at my leisure. They were believed to have absconded, insouciant young men of society intoxicated with the spirit of adventure, never to be heard from again.

  On occasion I invited Elizaveta to join me. She laughed when she saw her suitors shackled in my home. The fear in their eyes, the betrayal. Inevitably they cried out to her, much as they could, enervated by my feedings. You are in league with this demon, one accused her in my presence. He warned her of her soul’s fate and Elizaveta laughed the more; his accusations only increased our mirth. She watched the life depart his eyes as I finished him.

  And then the day came when we were forced apart.

  Her family was sending her to university abroad. She did not wish to leave me. She begged that she may move into my home. She pled that we might go off together. However, there were a variety of reasons I could not grant her wish. Until my Master’s return, I must remain in our house, charged with its security and upkeep. If Elizaveta joined me in my domicile, she would eventually be seen. We would be found out, and that would not have ended well.

  Furthermore, there were reasons I believed she should go. The idea of changing her had taken hold of me. That she should join me as a child of the night, my vampire bride. If she was to be my companion through the ages, I wished her development to be multi-faceted and complete. A university education would serve her well. I did not wish to let her go, but I thought it would benefit her. She would be gone a few years; what would three years or five or even a decade be to one such as I?

  I could not change her until I had spoken to Vinci.

  It was not his permission I sought. Nevertheless, Elizaveta would be the first I converted to our existence, and I believed I owed knowledge of such a measure to the one responsible for my own conversion. Moreover, there was the matter of her own willingness—apart from me would grant her the time to consider my proposal. For propose it I did. Our last night together, as we lay in my master’s house, I asked her if she would join me in defying death, in forestalling its arrival as only one like I could. She seemed quick to answer—and I harbored no doubt the proferred answer would be a confirmation—but I enjoined her not to. I asked her to wait and answer me upon her return.

  She reluctantly agreed. There were tears in her eyes that night when we left my master’s house, when we walked the Prospekt one last time. She was quiet on the Neva, holding my hand in her own. I will never forget. She reluctantly left me at her grandmother’s gate, and I watched her go.

  The following day she departed, and though she would come to return to Petersburg and my arms, it would not be the last night on which we were forced to part.

  Boone was snoring.

  Deep in his reverie, Rainford hadn’t noticed until that moment.

  “Really, Boone, such juvenile behavior.”


  The bound man snorted, shifting on the rack.

  Pomeroy reached forward and tapped Boone on the shoulder. When he failed to respond, Pomeroy pushed him, eliciting a wheeze and another change in position.

  “He insults you!” cried Wells. “Can we beat him now?”

  Pomeroy was looking to his master, a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Leave him,” ordered the Dark Lord. “I have business elsewhere.”

  7.

  5:03 P.M.

  “Evening, Werner,” Cheeks Carlucci said to the prison guard, the hack nodding at him, at the other men the inmate walked with.

  They called Carlucci Cheeks which sounded like a joke, sounded soft, but there was nothing soft about him. Cheeks with his dark, curly hair close to his head, his olive skin dark enough he could pass for Puerto Rican. Carlucci and his guys wearing what they wanted Inside, Cheeks in a jean shirt, the arms cut off, unbuttoned over his hairy pecs and flat stomach.

  It’d surprised Dickie they’d allowed them to wear whatever they wanted, Dickie getting to keep his crucifix and track suit. Even his tennis shoes, though they’d confiscated the laces. Dickie thinking maybe he should have held on to his watch. Nah, Sully deserved it.

  “That’s Werner.” Carlucci told Dickie when they were out of the guard’s ear shot. “Pezzo di merda,” calling the screw a piece of shit.

  “We got him?” Dickie meant was the hack on their payroll, would he do things needed doing, look the other way if something required it.

  “Yeah, we got him.”

  “Waste a fuckin’ money you ask me.” Jimmy Scal walked right behind them, Jimmy’s thinning hair slicked back, skin wan and jowly. The Scal wore tinted glasses with gold frames. Looked like a heavy guy who’d lost a lot of weight but looked better heavier. Dickie figured prison food didn’t agree with the Scal.

  Bianchi on the other hand…Bianchi and Nicky walked a few steps behind Jimmy Scal. Bianchi with his elbow. As he walked, he seemed to move side to side like some fat guys do. Nicky young and hard, all muscle, in for a short ride.

  They were showing Dickie around, filling him in on what he needed to know. Carluci narrating with an occasional comment from the Scal.

  “We’re good with the Yays,” Carlucci said loud enough for Dickie to hear as he raised a hand, greeting a group of brawny black inmates on the tier. “The Brotherhood,” nodding down to the tables where a group of white men sat, a lot of them with their heads shaved, sleeves rolled up or cut off to show ink, bare-torsos with more tattoos than flesh. “Far as they’re concerned, we’re niggers like the smokes, but we can do business with them guys. And no one fucks with the Mexicans,” the Mexicans smaller guys with feral looks in their eyes, congregating on the other side of the room below.

  “And not every Mexican is a Mexican,” noted the Scal.

  Dickie getting a feel for his new surroundings, wasn’t as bad as he thought it was going to be. Bianchi complaining to Nicky about his bursitis, about how his elbow had blown up to the size of a golf ball and he couldn’t get the prison doctor to drain it.

  They reached a t-junction and Dickie glanced down the corridor, something drawing his gaze. He stopped and stared, a cell cast in shadow having caught his eye, a man with a shaved head seated outside it.

  “Shouldn’t look down there too long, boss,” Bianchi had walked on ahead a bit, turned back with one hand on his bandaged elbow.

  “Who’s that and what’s in there?”

  “That?” Carlucci said of the man sitting there, the man’s skin sallow, the guy reaching into a Styrofoam cup and bringing whatever was in it out and into his mouth. “That’s Renfeld.”

  A crazed look on the man’s face, his eye twitching.

  “Why they call him Renfeld?” Dickie was watching as the man drew his pinched fingers out of the cup. Whatever he was holding squirmed in his grasp.

  “His name I guess.”

  “Looks like a skinny Uncle Fester,” volunteered Nicky.

  “He’s a Brit?”

  Renfeld popped the beetle into his mouth.

  Jimmy Scal pointed a finger to his head and said something in Italian.

  Carlucci told Dickie straight: “He’s fuckin’ nuts what he is.”

  Dickie felt drawn to the cell behind the seated bald man, like something inside it was looking out at him. He couldn’t see anything from here. The darkness in the cell seemingly palpable. Dickie reached up to the crucifix he wore, making sure it was still there.

  “Come on,” Carlucci’s hand on Dickie’s arm, Jimmy Scal on the other side of him drawing Dickie away, Bianchi holding his elbow and Nicky following.

  Renfeld cocked his head like only he could hear something, looking up for the first time, watching the five men go. His eye twitched uncontrollably and he started to giggle to himself, spittle flaking the side of his mouth, a finger poking around in his cup.

  8.

  5:30 P.M.

  Olga and Sarafina spent the day procuring and preparing the necessary tools. They’d needed a step ladder to reach the top of the china cabinet, and even then it was a stretch reaching the goblet atop it, neither woman tall, both well past their physical prime. The cup rested on the kitchen table now, freshly polished, gleaming. Olga’s weight made it difficult for her to venture outdoors. When something was needed, she asked Sarafina to retrieve it, and Sarafina was more than willing to go.

  They’d pushed the furniture aside in Olga’s living room, preparing a spot on the floor where the circle would be drawn. Eddie’s remains rested on a plastic-covered couch, under a sheet. There was no smell. Olga had treated her son’s body with herbs and poultices shortly after getting him home, going about her business earnestly, lovingly. The tenderness the woman directed upon her son, even in death. Sarafina had excused herself and gone out into the hallway to weep.

  Warrior and Leroi walked the floors and furniture of the five room apartment, their territory.

  There were things they needed for the coming ceremony, things from Eddie’s bedroom. Olga couldn’t bring herself to go in her boy’s room and asked Sarafina to go for her. Sarafina searched out what was needed. Eddie’s car key on his bureau. His black football jersey with gold stripes on the arms, the number 32 in gold on the back. There were twenty-five pairs of sneakers in the walk-in closet; Sarafina found the pair Olga had specified, blue on white hightops.

  It would have been better if they’d had more of Eddie’s personal items, his pager and money clip, the things he kept on his person. The thing was, he’d gone out with these on his last night, so the items were forever lost.

  Eddie’s t-shirt rested on his bed, which was made.

  Sarafina retrieved the shirt, freshly laundered, a scary looking person and the words Smells Like Children on it. Olga must have laid it here after drying it. Sarafina imagined her friend coming in here, what it must have cost her emotionally. She couldn’t imagine. She wondered if it’d been Olga who’d made the bed.

  In the living room, Olga sat on the floor consecrating the tools. The censer for the herbs was immersed in a bowl of salted water. Olga was passing the athame—a double bladed knife with a black hilt—through a candle’s flame.

  Sarafina placed Eddie’s clothes on the floor next to Olga. Leroi sat on the window sill, his back to the screen, watching Sarafina through heavily-lidded eyes, purring a mile a minute.

  “Thank you,” Olga told her friend.

  Olga was Sarafina’s friend, had been for a very long time. Olga was also magistra, high priestess of their coven. Sarafina held Olga and her powers in very high regard. And she shared Olga’s grief. Though she had no children herself, Eddie and his brother Billy had been like family to Sarafina. She’d watched the boys grow up, been there for Olga when what had happened with the boys’ father happened, comforted Olga and Eddie when Billy passed.

  Sarafina shared Olga’s grief.

  She shared her anger.

  She knew whatever she herself felt paled in comparison to
what her high priestess must be going through. And yet, knowing all this, knowing it was whoever had done what they’d done to Eddie that had set all this in motion, the normally quiet Sarafina felt compelled to speak.

  “Olga, if this is successful, they will know.”

  Olga didn’t look up from the floor, drying her censer. “Then let them know.”

  “If they know, they will come, Magistra.”

  “If they will come, let them come.”

  Olga had made up her mind and Sarafina knew it. The high priestess would do that which she intended to do. And Sarafina would help her, willingly, though she was all too aware that by their actions something terrible would be loosed upon the earth. Something terrible. The consequences unimaginable.

  Sarafina wondered if Eddie’s Uncle Paul on Long Island knew of this, if Olga had spoken to her brother. It didn’t matter. When this was done, all covens and all coveners of any real ability would know.

  Eddie’s bare feet jutted out from under one end of the sheet on the couch.

  Their course decided, Sarafina went about making herself useful, preparing the black bread in the kitchen. From this point on she would voice no questions, no doubts. She would assist her friend with diligence if not a little trepidation.

  A necromancy, Sarafina knew, was serious business, never to be taken lightly.

  9.

  6:00 P.M.

  Paperwork and a hangover had conspired to keep Gritz’s behind his desk and off the street the day before and most of today, but Gritz knew good police work meant getting out there and pounding some pavement. At the precinct he could sit behind his desk and look busy, his desk littered with sheaves of paper and files, empty coffee cups, his computer screen crammed with text and open windows. He’d sat back and read through Faust, occasionally glancing over to the original German-language text on the left side of the book, periodically looking something up online.