“Glitter,” Scav said with a laugh.
MacVicar stuck his hand into the master’s mouth, and though he instantly bit down, severing several of MacVicar’s fingers, MacVicar struggled with him until finally wrenching his fangs out of his face and revealing them to be prosthetics.
“Fake teeth. Fake blood. All this shit is a whole lot of smoke and mirrors for the mortals. I always knew you were into some funny business with your circle, Cashley, but I never thought you’d take it to the level of treason.”
“I have every right to establish my own House. I have been in the American West since before Brigham Young…”
MacVicar stamped down on the master’s face, squishing his head like a soggy pumpkin. Miranda gasped, but then watched in wonder as the shattered chunks of skull and pulverized brain knitted themselves back together and his entire head reformed, like a balloon reinflating. Only his thick plastic goggles didn’t mend. The pallid, white, pupilless orbs housed in his eye sockets and the wretched landscape of scars connecting them told the tale of why he always kept that half of his face hidden.
“Pull the other one,” MacVicar spat at him.
“Please, Mac, Scav,” the master whimpered, finally sounding as though he understood how precarious his position was, “you don’t understand the danger. There’s something hunting our kind.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard this fairy tale. There’s a,” Scav made quotation marks with his fingers, “‘serial killer’ taking out immortals.”
“Aye, I heard about that, too,” MacVicar agreed, “Probably just some Inquisitors getting too big for their britches.”
The master shook his head wildly.
“No. You don’t understand. It’s far worse than you can possibly imagine. I need other immortals to help protect me, and Father Otto won’t grant me permission to turn even a single get.”
“Knowing you, Cash,” MacVicar said, “I wouldnae either.”
Suddenly the brass bell at the lone entrance to the compound began ringing. Miranda looked up to one of the guard towers. A spotlight shone on Inessa’s chambers, illuninating the carnage within. An instant later the spotlight turned its attention to Miranda.
Dodging two poorly aimed rounds, she scurried into the chapel.
“Well, that’ll be the alarm,” MacVicar said, “I’d been hoping we might get a decent scrap out of this shit job.”
The master took advantage of the distraction to reach up and twist Scav’s leg, yanking it and wrenching it from its socket. Scav tumbled to the ground and the master popped up to his feet with a single flex of his back muscles. He stood now in the center of the aisle, backing away from the intruders and towards the altar, brandishing Scav’s severed leg like a cudgel to ward them off.
Scrabbling to grab hold of a pew, Scav pulled himself upright, balancing on his remaining foot. Miranda stared at Scav’s stump, wondering briefly if his leg would regenerate like a lizard’s, but it didn’t. It seemed that immortals were capable of healing almost any damaged flesh, but could not regrow lost parts. No wonder, then, that their clashes descended into bouts of dismemberment.
“Toss me the lad’s leg, Cashley,” MacVicar growled.
“You have no idea what’s coming, fixer. You’re going to wish you’d listened to me. I’ve seen things. Dreadful things hiding in the shadows. Otto Signari won’t be able to stand against him. Not even Cicatrice will be able to stand against him.”
Suddenly a hole exploded in the wall behind the altar. Perhaps sensing his distress, the master’s six remaining immortal brides had eschewed the door entirely and simply punched their way in. The chosen few wore scintillating white jumpsuits to signal their elevated status in the compound.
“Ah,” the master said with a grin, “the cavalry’s arrived. Seems I have a leg up at last.”
He tossed the full grown man’s leg as effortlessly as if he were passing a Frisbee. Scav snatched it out of the air.
“Newborns, Cashley?” MacVicar said with a snort. “Have you even weaned them off flesh yet?”
“All that should matter to you, fixer, is how hard they’ll fight for me. I don’t intend to go gentle into the abyss.”
MacVicar clapped his hands together.
“I do so love my job. Nothing like putting down a traitor as well as his Houseless bastards. How you feeling, Scav?”
Scav had reattached his leg to his stump, but the area where it had been torn away still seemed soft and scabrous. Suddenly his eyes alighted on Miranda, and flashed with a bestial hunger.
“Actually, I’m feeling a bit peckish. Maybe I’ll have a quick bite before this imbroglio.”
The pseudo-punk, with half his pantleg pooled around his ankle, lunged at Miranda.
“Wait!” Miranda shouted, pulling down her right sleeve and showing her wrist.
Scav paused, his head bobbing in the air like a bird’s. “What’s that?”
“Just a bit of cosmetics,” she said.
She pulled her wrist across her jumpsuit, rubbing away the foundation. Underneath the makeup was a tattoo of a green double cross, with an olive branch to the left of it and a sword to the right of it.
“Inquisitor!” Scavatelli hissed.
“That’s right. I spent the last three weeks infiltrating this cult for a shot at that sorry son of a bitch.” Her finger shot out in Cashley’s direction. “After all the shit I’ve had to take from him and Inessa, there’s no way I’m letting two low-rent fixers eat my lunch.”
She plunged her hand into her front cargo pocket, slipping her fingers between the pages of her hollowed-out copy of “the sacred text,” and pulled out the Colt .45 hand cannon she kept hidden there. With her other hand she ripped open the seam of her pantleg and pulled a long, wicked blade from the scabbard that ran practically the whole length of her thigh. Thank God for Cashley’s modesty rules. She’d managed to keep it taped there for her whole tenure in the compound.
Scav roared and charged at the vampire hunter, even as she filled the air with bullets. Their stopping power wouldn’t do much to harm a vampire, but if she was lucky and destroyed his eyes it would buy her the precious seconds she needed to sever his head.
She managed to catch one eye, but not the other, and then when she took her stroke it went astray. It was enough to move him out of her guard, but the vital moment of surprise was lost. Now she would need all of her skill – and luck – to survive.
“Bury that glog quick, Scav,” MacVicar shouted, bracing himself for the onslaught of Cashley and his six brides, “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
Scav hissed and leapt at her. As though she had been struck by a bolt of lightning, she was suddenly on her back, both hands pinned to the floor and her weapons clattering away out of reach. The blow had knocked the wind out of her and as she fought the panic of being unable to draw in oxygen, she struggled, but she wasn’t even a rag doll in his grasp. She was like a butterfly, already pinned to a board.
Then, like a tiny miracle, oxygen flooded into her lungs and she took a deep gasp. It had seemed an eternity, though she knew it had really only been a few seconds, and her wits finally returned to her. Looking up she wondered why the killing blow hadn’t come. But Scav wasn’t even paying attention to her.
The vampire was staring at the door. She glanced back down the aisle and saw MacVicar, Cashley, and the six newborns all staring at the doorway, too, paused in mid-movement like a VHS tape. That, more than anything, brought a sinking feeling to Miranda’s stomach.
The sound of a horse snuffling cut through Miranda’s torso like a knife. Defying all the boogeymen in her intestines screaming at her not to look, she turned her head toward the entranceway and caught sight first of the black hooves dripping a substance so dark it must have been tar, but she feared it was not.
Over her head, in a child’s voice, Scav whispered, “Il cacciatore del morto.”
Miranda blinked and strained her neck to see the rest of the dark figure. The horse was black on black, with bla
ck eyes that didn’t even seem to reflect the moonlight. The man astride the charger was sealed in a wall of black plate armor, festooned with spikes and barbs. No mortal could have carried such armor; it must have weighed two tons. Like the horse’s hair, the man’s armor dripped with the dark, syrupy substance.
The high helmet he wore had two long, curved horns, but otherwise it was nearly impossible to pick out any part of him. He had all the appearance of a blob of fresh black ink that had somehow been smeared on the landscape. He held a bastard sword in one hand, and in the other, seemingly defying the laws of physics; he held a long, pointed lance weighed down with what had to be a dozen corpses. From the hilt to the tip, stacked one on top of each other, each of Cashley’s remaining wives and concubines, at least fifteen of them or so, had been pierced directly through the heart. Blood soaked their grey jumpsuits.
Their feud forgotten, Miranda and Scav rose to their feet. The horse slowly cantered into the temple. As it did, the knight merely shifted his lance, lifting it up into the air at a downward sloping angle. Alice’s body toppled from the lance first. Peggy’s followed.
And with barely a shake, the bodies of a dozen or more of Cashley’s followers fell from the mounted figure’s lance and formed a trail behind him, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
Cashley was the first to regain his senses. He cowered, pushing his brides into a semi-circular shield wall in front of him.
“I warned you. I warned you, MacVicar. Everyone’s scared of a serial killer but now you see what’s really happening.”
The knight raised his lance in MacVicar’s direction, as though lining up a gigantic pool cue for a difficult shot. Scav seemed to realize what was about to happen.
“No!”
“Scav, don’t!”
Scav flew through the air like a bird of prey dropping onto an unsuspecting rodent, but his trajectory was immediately arrested. Without looking in his direction, the knight lashed out with his blade, and sliced cleanly through Scav’s neck with a single stroke. His head came to a rest, balanced on the outstretched blade, while his torso crumpled to the floor.
“You motherfucker!” MacVicar roared, dropping to his knees. “You cocksucking bastard!”
His face remained dry, but Miranda could have sworn he was weeping. He was unable to produce tears. One of the many, dark in-betweens of being a vampire.
The horse reared back on its hind legs. Like a wave, the great darkling mass poured down the aisle. Even with the preternatural speed of his kind, MacVicar couldn’t get out of the way before the figure was upon him.
The black knight’s lance struck true, and the force of the blow impaled MacVicar practically up to the hilt. Miranda had never seen a vampire actually killed with a stake to the heart. It was nearly impossible – a joke. Practically every vampire wore a piece of armor across their chest, and judging by the glint of metal around the hole in MacVicar’s body, the Signari fixer had been no exception. Miranda’s mouth hung open as it occurred to her that the mysterious knight had pierced through an inch of plate metal and Kevlar, not to mention a man’s ribcage, with a single stroke.
There was no way. Was it possible? Was this really the semi-mythic Hunter of the Dead?
The knight sat there astride his horse, holding up Scav’s sire bodily, not half a meter from his featureless mask. He seemed to be examining MacVicar like a diner looking at a hair in his soup. Then he lifted his lance over his head and snapped it forward like a bullwhip. The crumpled mass that had been MacVicar flew off and smashed into the rear wall of the chapel, a few feet above Cashley’s head.
“Protect me!” Cashley shrieked, ducking down so that his brides formed a barrier in front of him, and stumbling off toward the hole they had punched through the back wall.
The bastard sword cut an arc through the air and bifurcated one of the brides through her waist, sending her torso toppling forward before the blade passed through the back of the crouching Cashley’s head. Cashley’s corpse crumpled into a heap, his hasty retreat ended before it had even begun.
The five brides whose legs remained attached to their bodies tripped over one another trying to flee through the hole in the back wall. But that, too, was no avail. The knight was upon them in an instant, skewering hearts and ripping heads from their bodies with only his gauntleted hands. When those five were dealt with, he turned to look for the top half of the bride who had been split in two.
She was scrabbling away on her palms. The knight raised his lance.
“No, no, no, no!” the bride began muttering.
With a furious slam he brought the lance down through the middle of her chest, snapping the tip of the weapon with the force of the blow and sending it hurtling away to embed itself in one of the walls. The lance was so heavy that when he let it go it toppled to the ground and raised the halved vampire off the floor. She strained and struggled to pull herself free of the impaling lance, but her efforts were either in vain or too slow. The knight dismounted, retrieved his bastard sword from Cashley’s severed head, and lopped through her brainpan at nose level.
Then, as if some eldritch and terrible god had cast its eye upon her, Miranda saw the horns of the knight’s helmet turning in her direction. In that instant, she became certain that this was the legendary Hunter of the Dead.
Even weighed down with so much armor, The Hunter was upon her in a split second, and pressed his dripping sword to Miranda’s breast.
“I…I’m on your side,” she said, holding up her wrist to display her tattoo, “I’m an Inquisitor. We hunt…”
The blade drove into Miranda’s sternum and exited just as quickly, drawing a trail of crimson through the air like an exploding firework.
Night One
One
A few days before…
The young girl sat on the roof watching the sun set. Autumnal violets and crimsons devoured the fields and paddies of her homestead, and receded into the night.
She felt him before she saw him, like an arctic breeze raising goosepimples on her neck.
“I didn’t think to wait for you so long,” she whispered.
“My dear, I am but an ignoble caliban for making you wait,” Topan replied. His Cantonese was flawless, as always. “I had to deal with your parents.”
Her eyes opened wide and she turned to look at him. He was smiling; that flawless, charming smile that set everyone at ease, even her father who mistrusted everyone and everything. There was no guile in Topan’s eyes, just delight.
She ran her hands through her hair, which was still messy from the day’s work, and felt embarrassed suddenly. She was no one, a no-account night soil farmer from a no-account village in an underdeveloped section of Guangdong province. What would they say about her clothes and her hair and her fingernails in Beijing? Or, for that matter, in Guangzhou?
A hick, a rube, a nobody. They’d laugh at her. And yet…
And yet here was Topan, a wealthy foreigner, and he had eyes seemingly only for her. She couldn’t believe it was her appearance. There were prettier girls in the village. It certainly wasn’t her family’s relative wealth. Though he had never explicitly said so, she believed he could buy their entire village many times over.
So why her? She shook her head, letting her messy brown hair fall over her face. Best not to question such fortune.
“And they’re all right? I mean, they’ll let me go away with you?”
He took her hand and kissed it.
“They won’t be a problem anymore. I promise you.”
“And we can leave? Go to Beijing or Hong Kong?”
He laughed.
“If you like. We can go anywhere you desire. First, though, I need to take you to meet my father.”
“In Malaysia?”
“No. I didn’t mean my biological father. He’s long dead. I meant…well, you’ll find out. My real father. In America.”
“America?”
He nodded.
“How’s your English?”
She paused before answering in that language, “Quite fine, thank you very much.”
“Oh, you’ll do magnificently in America.”
She laughed and pressed her free hand over her face to hide the tears. He shook his head and parted her hair carefully before smoothing it over her ears and then gently forcing her hand away from her face.
“You shouldn’t cover up so much. You’re beautiful.”
“I’m not, though. Not really.”
“I told my father about you. I told him you were Iði’s shining talk.”
She stared at him and shook her head slowly.
“I don’t understand.”
He pursed his lips.
“In Norse myth Iði was a giant, one of three brothers. Their father was immensely wealthy and when he died the brothers, being giants and thus not famous for their accounting skills, had to invent a method for dividing the inheritance. So, each one took a mouthful of treasure at a time until they had three equal piles. And so today we have the saying for a treasure beyond reckoning, ‘Iði’s mouthful’ or ‘Iði’s shining words.’”
The cicadas were roaring and she felt her heart pounding in her chest. She feared her face was as red as a cherry.
“I can’t really be so precious to you.”
“You have no idea of your own worth. I’ve searched for you all my life.”
He wrapped his fingers around the back of her neck and placed his thumb on her cheek, stroking it.
“Topan…”
“Let me take you.”
She froze, as if suddenly aware for the first time of the strange man’s immense physical power. She felt certain if he squeezed, her neck would shatter, and if she tried to run, he could snatch her before she made it two steps.
“Topan, I don’t know if…”
“My dear, all the preparations have been seen to. Now is the time. I’m afraid this is going to hurt. Quite a bit.”
Hunter of the Dead Page 2