“I thought only really powerful va…uh, immortals could do that?”
She shrugged and smiled again, like a kitten this time. He rolled down off of her and lay on the bed beside her. He reached over, letting his hand slide across her breast, and fingered the golden key.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Chuckling, she took the key off her neck and dropped it into the drawer of the night stand.
“That is not for prying eyes.”
“Oh? Some sort of super secret squirrel vampire business?”
“Yes, precisely.”
He nodded. Then he fingered her other necklace.
“Okay. How about this, then?
“No, that’s not a secret squirrel.”
He chuckled.
“I’ve been staring at it all night.
“That’s what you were staring at?” she asked, raising her hand to cover her breasts demurely, as though she had been snubbed.
He grinned broadly. “Well…you know what I mean. What is it?”
“It was a gift. From my favorite uncle, before he passed away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How did he die?”
“He was a worker in a metal shop. His arm got caught in one of the machines. He didn’t lose it, but gangrene set in. They amputated, but it was too late.”
“That’s a sad story.”
She shrugged.
“You work with dangerous things long enough and they’ll hurt you. But in the good old days, when he still had both arms, he made this for me with some scrap. I think I was his favorite niece the same way that he was my favorite uncle. He never said so, but he did make me this.”
“Is it your name?”
She looked down at the characters.
“My name? No. At least, not my proper name. It was one of his nicknames for me. I used to pick him poppies sometimes from down by the river. So he called me his little red flower…no…blood flower.”
Nico fingered the metal.
“This is Mandarin for blood flower?”
“Cantonese.”
“What’s the difference?”
She tapped her teeth, thinking.
“Well, you’re from Puerto Rico, right?”
“Right.”
“What’s the difference between that and Cuba?”
He furrowed his brow and sat up.
“Oh, tons of things. I mean, for one thing…oh, I get it.”
She smiled. He lay back down and she began to trace invisible pictures across his bare chest.
“Why did you ask to look in that woman’s mirror? Does your reflection go away eventually?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so. I think that’s more of a metaphor than anything else.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you know, a lot of serial killers refuse to look in the mirror. The police go in to raid their lairs and they find all the mirrors smashed, all the pictures ruined. Like they can’t bear to look at themselves, or something.”
Four
The door to Price’s apartment exploded inward. Stunned, Price threw himself flat to the ground, but grunted in pain as a hundred splinters embedded themselves into his hip, thigh, and leg. Pushing with his right leg and scrabbling with his elbows he pulled himself out of the way.
Looking up, he saw that Cicatrice had been torn to ribbons, chunks of wood sprouting from his eyes, forehead, chest, crotch, and extremities. Cicatrice was stunned only for a moment, and his body began to forcibly eject the splinters and shards of wood as his wounds healed. To aid the regenerative process, he began pulling some of the larger pieces out by hand.
“Cicatrice!”
Price looked towards the missing door. A man he didn’t know stood there, eyes blazing. He was kitted out in what Price instantly recognized as one of Bonaparte’s uniforms. A layer of chainmail, covered over with a (theoretically) impregnable SWAT team uniform. The chain was made of rosary pieces, and the pads were covered with religious iconography, making all the armor theoretically hateful to a bloodsucker. Like all of Bonaparte’s men he wore iconic rings on every finger, and carried a sword on his hip and an automatic shotgun with heavy stopping power in his hands.
The man had his visor up so that Cicatrice could see his face.
“You look at me, Cicatrice! You look at the man who’s going to kill you. You recognize me?”
“Oh, Patrick,” Cicatrice said calmly, the last of the wood shards popping out of his body and tumbling to the floor, “Finally realized little Francis was missing, did you?”
Patrick bit his lower lip and raised his shotgun at Cicatrice, obviously wanting to taunt the vampire but clearly so roiling with fury that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You tell me what you did with him! I’ve got the money. You can give him back if he’s still alive. I’ll let you walk away.”
“The money? What are you a child, Patrick? Who did you think you were dealing with? What did you think would happen when I said your firstborn was down payment?”
Tears were streaming down Patrick’s face.
“I…I…I…”
“Uh uh uh, what? You thought it was a metaphor? A joke? A reference to the Merchant of Venice? Yes, lots of shylocks deal in literary references. Your boy’s been dead for days. He died the day you defaulted to me. He made a meal for my daughter. She didn’t speak of it, but I suspect he was delicious. Well, not that it mattered. She was voracious at the time.”
Screaming, Patrick rushed at Cicatrice.
“No, you moron!” Price cried out, reaching out, but it was too late. Cicatrice had taunted him into forgetting all his weapons and fancy gear.
With expert aim, Cicatrice knocked the helmet off Patrick’s head, sending it flying until it embedded itself into the mortarboard of Price’s apartment wall. Cicatrice cupped Patrick’s head with his hand and began digging his fingernails into his skull.
“You ruined my life,” Patrick shrieked.
“Then allow me to relieve you of it,” Cicatrice whispered.
Cicatrice pressed until Patrick’s head exploded like a raw egg. Brains, chunks of skull, nose parts, and various effluvia rained down on Price and his floor.
“All right, we gave the father his chance!” a familiar voice shouted. “Move, move move!”
Cicatrice bared his teeth like a feral predator. The game was afoot. Bonaparte’s men began rappelling in through the windows, and a squad poured in through the door Patrick had blasted open. Metal began to fly through the air, as shotguns discharged from every side and Cicatrice was caught in a 360° crossfire. His body was reduced to a ragged pulp and splattered to the ground.
With their visors down, Price found it impossible to identify any of the Inquisitors. One of them cried out, “Go, go, go! Move in for the kill!”
The Inquisitors began holstering their firearms and drawing cutting implements and religious icons. The wretched mess of gristle and muscle which had been Cicatrice pulsated on the floor. The first man on the scene charged forward with an axe, and brought it swinging down in an arc at what had formerly been Cicatrice’s head.
A pseudopod which had gradually reordered itself into a flayed human hand snatched the axehead out of the air, stopping it in mid-collision and snapping both of the axe-wielding Inquisitor’s arms with the impact in a sickening series of crunches. Cicatrice roared, flipping the axe over and swinging it one-handed so that he easily cut through plate, chain, and ankles alike, severing both feet in one motion and sending the unlucky axe-wielder tumbling to the ground.
“He’s recovering!” Bonaparte shouted, “Don’t let up the pressure!”
Within just that space of time Cicatrice had recovered to the point that he had the appearance of a skinless man, a gruesome illustration out of Gray’s Anatomy but instead of lying blandly on the page, he was raging out like a furious bull.
Chastened by their comrade’s double amputation, the rest of the Inquisitors maintained their
distance. Several had crucifixes attached to the ends of long poles. One of the Inquisitors reached out and pressed the crucifix at the end of his pole to Cicatrice’s chest, where his ribcage was still trying to reform.
The open flesh of the vampire’s chest sizzled where the silver icon touched it, and ceased to mend. With a hand which still had bone fingers poking through raggedly flowing meat, Cicatrice grabbed the crucifix, which caused his still-ruined hand to sizzle, and flung it towards the missing door.
The force of Cicatrice’s yank took the Inquisitor who had been holding the crucifix off his feet. He stumbled and fell right into Cicatrice’s armpit. As though he were cracking a nut with a nutcracker, Cicatrice squeezed with his armpit and shattered the Inquisitor’s helmet, which flaked away like the shell off a hard-boiled egg.
Cicatrice wrapped his bloody, mending arm around the Inquisitor’s neck and caught him in a chokehold. The man’s face turned purple and he slapped uselessly at the monster’s arm, as though tapping out of a for-fun wrestling match.
Cicatrice’s eyeless skull, dancing with muscle and sinew like a dot matrix printer gradually laying down words, leaned in towards his captured prey. The grotesque visage opened its mouth, its stump of a tongue just coming back together enough to say, “You picked the wrong fucker to fuck with!”
Suddenly the captured Inquisitor’s hair began to gray and his skin began to wrinkle. Skin began to recover Cicatrice’s body as his healing process went into overdrive.
“No, you idiots!” Price grunted, scrabbling across the floor and snatching a pistol out of the holster of an Inquisitor who wasn’t paying attention. “Don’t let him feed!”
Price leveled the pistol at the captured Inquisitor’s head. The world was still swimming from pain and revulsion, but Price had held guns level in far bleaker situations. Price didn’t recognize the kid, but he vaguely reminded him of Jerry Govarti, an Inquisitor he had run with back in the ‘70s.
“Sorry, Jerry.”
Price put one in the back of the kid’s head. Cicatrice roared with frustration, his meal suddenly spoiled and twitching from nerve impulses.
The air stank of blood, offal, and the spilled bowels and bladders of the dead. It had been a long time since Price had been caught in quite such an abbatoir, and he took the opportunity to turn and retch up whatever little was left of his supper from that evening.
“Give him another whiff of grapeshot,” Bonaparte ordered.
The Inquisitors poured metal into Cicatrice like there was no tomorrow. Several came down to clicking their empty shotguns. Price dragged himself into a corner and propped himself up to get a better look at the action.
He had never particularly liked Cicatrice, per se, but he had always had a certain respect for him, and like any reasonable individual, an intense and implacable fear. As such, he didn’t like seeing the mighty man reduced to a ruined lump of protoplasm. The Inquisitors didn’t let up until they had practically pureed him.
This time, the mass that had been the vampire patriarch was very slow to reform into anything resembling a human form. The gelatin-like mess quivered and raged in one or two directions, but its regeneration lacked the urgency it had shown last time. Even a vampire House patriarch was subject to the laws of physics, and Price had deprived him of his meal. He would fast be running out of energy, arcane or otherwise.
Bonaparte took off her helmet and knelt down at Price’s side.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m great. Fuck Folgers. This is how I like to start every day.”
Bonaparte put a hand on his shoulder and she even seemed to smile.
“Do you need anything?”
“I could use a juicebox. Maybe one of those, what do you call those things that you use to watch a play better? Opera glasses.”
She squeezed his shoulder.
“We’ll get some paramedics out here to see to your leg shortly. We just have to finish up first.”
Price nodded. She rose and turned back to her men.
“Icons! Put one on each limb and at least one more on the center of gravity.”
Eight Inquisitors stepped forward tentatively with crosses on poles like the poor, unlucky Jerry Govarti-looking fellow. One held down each of his feet and hands and a fifth placed his on Cicatrice’s side. Where the crosses touched Cicatrice’s bare, exposed flesh sizzled and burned and the area around it ceased to heal.
Bonaparte strode across the room like a Roman conqueror at his own parade. She stepped gingerly over the bodies of her fallen comrades and came to a stop over Cicatrice’s body. He had seemed to stop fighting, finally accepting that he was pinned. His face had recovered to the extent that he could speak and turned to look up at Bonaparte balefully with his Martian eye.
“Why did you let that buffoon lead your charge?” he croaked out.
She examined her fingernails.
“He came to me. I promised a chance to put you down. I let him take it. He did not do so well.”
Cicatrice glanced around the room as visors went up and helmets came off.
“I recognize some faces.”
“All of us have sworn revenge on you for one reason or another. This was an all-volunteer raid.”
Cicatrice cackled, a mirthless sound that chilled Price to the bone. The man was normally so perversely incapable of showing emotion, even now, at the end, it seemed completely alien for him to do so even mockingly.
“If every man who’s ever sworn revenge on me had taken it, I’d’ve been put down a hundred thousand times by now.”
“Just once will satisfy me.” Bonaparte nudged Cicatrice’s right wrist with her boot. “I see you were an Inquisitor once. I’ve always considered it a special duty to put down former Inquisitors who have been turned. The same way I put down my own father, who taught me everything I know. It’s a matter of respect for the office.”
“Kings don’t kill kings,” Cicatrice whispered.
Bonaparte nodded. She pulled open the Velcro of her riot gear and reached into her blouse to draw out a beautifully carved wooden stake. She held it over Cicatrice’s good eye so he could get a good look.
“Remember this?”
He nodded.
“It was the closest I ever came to being killed.”
Bonaparte tapped her glass eye with the point of the stake.
“Me, too. I refuse to use this on any other nightcrawler. This stake’s reserved for you.”
Cicatrice nodded. Then, with an unholy roar he arched his back and brought his spine back down on the floor with an earthshattering crack, ripping a massive hole in the floor. As Cicatrice’s body disappeared, the five Inquisitors who had been holding him down stumbled.
One tripped over her own feet and nearly tumbled into the hole in the floor, but managed to grab onto the edge with both hands just in time. She managed to pull herself up so that almost her entire torso was above floor level, but then her arms were locked and she was having trouble getting her legs up.
“Help,” entreated the Inquisitor who had nearly fallen into the hole, a 30-something woman with a short mop of black hair, “Give me a hand, I need to…”
The raven-haired woman’s expression changed to one of alarm. Bonaparte and another Inquisitor rushed to grab her shoulders and a sickening rip split the air, followed by a prolonged splat. Bonaparte and the other helper were suddenly caught flat-footed as the black-haired Inquisitor suddenly came rocketing up out of her precarious position as though she had suddenly become fifty pounds lighter.
As they fumbled inelegantly with the body, Price saw that her body had been ripped in half at the navel, and her intestines and lower GI tract had unspooled down into the apartmentbelow. Lengths of viscera still hung from the half-woman, trailing down into what was no doubt a gruesome scene in the lower apartment.
Bonaparte blinked the blood out of her eyes, but that was about the extent of her confusion.
“Go, go, go!” she shouted, pointing around the room. “He’s on the
next floor down! If you have a rig set up rappel down! Everybody else take the stairs!”
The Inquisitors who had come in through the windows began jumping out of them, and the others scrambled through the missing door. All except Bonaparte, who remained standing there, a grim look on her face.
“Don’t do it,” Price said.
“He’ll be gone otherwise.”
“You’ll break both your damn legs.”
She shrugged.
“I never planned to walk away from this, anyway.”
Grimacing, Bonaparte dropped into the hole. Price watched as only her fingers were visible to him, grabbing onto the edge. Then she grunted and let go. He lay back, for the first time realizing how fast his heart was racing and how much pain he was in, from his leg. Every nerve in his lower body was screaming at him, and probably had been the whole time, but he’d either been so full of adrenaline or so distracted by the histrionics he hadn’t noticed.
He glanced around the blood-spattered room. The walls were painted with effluvia, and broken bodies lay in every horrific position imaginable.
“Jesus,” Price muttered, looking around at the the wreckage and eviscera strewn about his apartment, “I’m never getting the security deposit back on this place.”
With considerable effort, Price pulled himself forward on his elbows, nearly slipping several times on the bloody surface of his floor.
“Fucker,” he muttered as he skinned one elbow, but it wasn’t nearly as long as he had expected until he was over the lip of the hole in his floor and able to look down.
Cicatrice was at the window, but an Inquisitor in a rappelling rig appeared, and though he seemed startled, leveled his shotgun at the vampire and pulled the trigger. Cicatrice jumped out of the way, though he still caught a good shoulderful of buckshot.
The vampire was still naked, the only vestiges of his clothes a few tattered strings and the all-but-ruined plate of armor he wore over his heart and upper ribcage. His skin was almost all gone and in places bone showed where his flesh was still mending. It was impossible to miss that after his second round of being blown to bits, he was healing much slower.
Bonaparte was on the floor, her shotgun leveled at him. She was limping ever-so-slightly. Perhaps she had turned her ankle in the drop, but she had certainly not shattered both legs as Price had expected. A door to Cicatrice’s left opened and Bonaparte took her eyes off him for a split-second.
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