Wes and Solange ran along a high, wrought-iron fence; beyond it was a sloping lawn and a dark, Tudor-style mansion framed with palm trees. The driveway, closed off from the street by a locked gate, lay just a few yards ahead. Wes could see that the bars had been forced apart as if with a crowbar. There might just be room enough for them to squeeze through—If they could get to that house and a telephone…! But the ambulance was gaining on them, swerving around the high Washingtonia palms, clumps of grass flying up behind the tires. They reached the gate, and Wes shoved Solange through the bars. She tripped and fell on the other side, but he squeezed through and pulled her up, then both of them ran toward that house. The ambulance crashed into the gate behind them, knocking it open and smashing both headlights with a noise like a shotgun blast. Wes saw that some of the mansion’s windows were broken out; it looked dead and desolate, and he realized with a surge of panic that they could already be inside. He looked back and saw the driver’s pallid, grinning face streaked with the orange light. The ambulance was again almost on them. Wes wrenched Solange to the side as it roared past and up the hill, cutting them off from the house. It skidded up on the lawn, turning in a tight circle, and slammed into a palm tree.
They ran on, cutting across the lawn and past the house. Just on the other side of the hill’s crest was a white, concrete structure that looked like a storage shed. A stone walkway led down through a landscaped flower bed, and below that was a swimming pool with a canopied bathhouse. Wes couldn’t hear the ambulance anymore, but he knew they’d be coming soon. He tried the shed’s door. It was locked, so he kicked it open. He stood among sacks of concrete mix and potting soil, various tools, a few large ceramic pots, and several cans of paint. Even before he heard Solange shout, he heard the ambulance roaring across the lawn. He lifted one of the paint cans and pried its lid loose.
“Stay here!” he yelled at Solange and ran down into the flower beds where the vampires could see him. The ambulance came for him, its grillwork grinning like the mouth of a hungry ogre. He saw the flicker of recognition across the driver’s face. Before the ambulance could slow down, Wes heaved the paint can at the windshield, then leaped to one side with Solange’s scream ringing in his ears.
The glass shattered, bright blue swimming pool paint covering the interior of the ambulance and blinding the things inside. It swerved, roared on past Wes through the flowers, and pitched over a small brick wall that separated them from the pool area. The ambulance nosed into the deep end of the pool with a huge splash. Hot metal hissed. The orange light grew weaker, casting rippled reflections.
Wes didn’t wait to see if the things could get out. He ran back up to Solange, and at the crest of the hill they could both see the streaks of orange flashing out in the street. Wes froze.
“The house,” Solange said.
It was the only choice they had. They got in through a pair of shattered French doors at the rear of the house, which opened onto a large sitting room where furniture, cabinets, and bookshelves had been overturned as if in a mad fury. Wes fumbled through the debris, trying to find a telephone in the dark. Solange picked up a lamp and stood at the doors; her eyes were wide and shining with fear but her hand was steady, with the lamp’s metal base poised as a weapon. In another moment she thought she sensed movement outside. Wes did, too; he froze where he was, crouched on the floor with dirt all over his clothes and face.
Solange listened, her heart beating hard. They were there, she was sure of it. And now she heard the wet squeaking of shoes just beyond the doors. They would be coming through any second now. Her grip tightened on the lamp, though she was well aware she couldn’t fight them hand-to-hand.
And then in the distance, there were two gunshots. It might have been from the house next door or from across the street. The shots were followed by a woman’s scream and a man’s rising, madly babbling voice. Another siren began to shriek. She heard the slapping squeak of the shoes running away from the doors, quickly fading. She exhaled and leaned against the wall, lowering the lamp. “They’re gone,” she said after she’d caught her breath again. “I think they found something better…”
Wes shoved aside an overturned coffee table and found lying underneath it an old black antique that Ma Bell herself must’ve used about a hundred years ago. When he picked it up, his heart sank—it had been ripped from its terminal. “Damn it!” he breathed. “We’ve got to call the cops!”
“There’s no use in that,” Solange said quietly. “The police won’t be able to help. If they did come, they’d only…find those things waiting for them…”
“What about Jimmy?” It was all he could do to keep himself from shouting. His strained voice echoed through the room, many ghosts speaking at once. “What in God’s name are they?” He knew the answer to that already, and there was no need for her to utter the awful word. “It can’t be!” he said. “They’re not real…not real…!” He steadied himself against an old sofa with red velvet cushions that had white music notes and lettering stitched on them, The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi and Charleston, Charleston. “Somebody must live here,” he said. “They must be upstairs.” He was afraid to shout, though, for fear those things outside might hear him.
“I think you’re wrong,” Solange said. Wes stared up at her. “Look around. I think the things have come here and gone.”
He forced himself to look. The mangled burglar bars were bad enough; a large, gilt-framed mirror was smashed all to pieces and now hung crookedly over a cold fireplace. Antique lamps lay in fragments on the floor. A couple of bookcases had been overturned, scattering old volumes and little ceramic figurines. Solange bent and picked up one of the figures—it was the remnants of a ballet dancer, both legs and one of the arms broken off. The tiny painted face smiled up at her.
“There’s got to be a working phone somewhere in this goddamned tomb!” Wes said and moved through a pair of sliding oak doors into a carpeted corridor that led to the front door. There were more smashed mirrors and framed posters of old movies—One Night in Madrid, The Prince and the Showgirl, Hollywood’s Heaven. Through the front windows he saw the orange flicker and thought he saw figures moving out on the lawn.
Solange was beside him. “An elevator,” she said, and Wes turned. Next to a stairway with thick, ornately carved banisters, there was a wire-mesh elevator shaft.
“Yeah. Fine. So what?” he said irritably. He glanced back toward the front door, a shiver rippling through him. “Where did those things come from? What in God’s name made them like that?”
Solange said, “We’re not safe yet. We’ve got to find a place to hide in case they come after us again.” She started for the stairway, and he was about to follow when a cold hand snaked out of the darkness and gripped his wrist.
THREE
Roach was down on the cold stone floor, whimpering like a dog at Prince Vulkan’s feet. Vulkan, sitting in his chair at the long, waxed table covered with maps and diagrams, paid the human little attention. He stared into the fire, his face caught between light and shadow. The room still smelled of Falco’s charred body; the dogs in the lower basement had gone wild over the cooked meat. Dust to dust, Vulkan thought, and ashes to ashes. Over on the other side of the table, Kobra sat, his boots propped up before him, and watched Roach through narrowed, red-lit eyes; he held Falco’s femur in his left hand like a hideous scepter. Since after midnight couriers from Vulkan’s lieutenants had been coming up the mountain to report on the shifting concentrations of activity—troops were now rampaging through Hollywood and Beverly Hills and a great part of southern L.A., including an area called Watts, which had already fallen. There had been several skirmishes with police officers who’d never known what they were chasing until it was too late. The control tower at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport had been overtaken, and some of the less-disciplined ones had amused themselves by crashing a few private planes. A military school in Westwood Village had been taken, and along with it sixty-eight young boys who had been asleep in the
ir beds when the attack came; they would make fine soldiers tomorrow night. But for the most part the action had been hit-and-run, which was how Prince Vulkan preferred it right now. Individual houses broken into, the sleeping man and woman and children quickly drunk dry and shrouded away from the sunlight to sleep awhile longer; cars flagged down on the avenues and boulevards, their drivers taken by surprise; apartment complexes taken silently, one cubicle after the next. Prince Vulkan had been in L.A. a little over a month now, and by his conservative estimate there were over six hundred thousand of his kind spread across the city. Moreover, the number doubled every night. His fangs had sired the beginnings of a new race.
He touched Roach’s shoulder; the man looked up at him, his face as joyous and dumb as a devoted puppy’s. “You’re safe now,” Vulkan said quietly. “You recognized your weakness down there, and you were wise to call for—”
“I could’ve killed all those fucking cops,” Kobra said. “I could’ve done it easy, the Death Machine and me, killed them all…”
“I didn’t speak to you,” the prince said, angered at being interrupted. “I didn’t ask you to speak. Did I?”
“You don’t need him,” Kobra said, his gaze burning with a sullen glare. “You said I was going to sit at your right hand. You said that’s why you called me from Mexico, because I was special—”
“I didn’t speak to you!” Vulcan snapped.
Kobra stared back at him for only a second or so, then dropped his gaze and flung the bone into the fireplace. “I need both of you,” Vulkan declared, “equally.”
“Why do you need one of them?” Kobra said, and this time he looked away immediately because Vulkan’s green eyes had flared like blasts of napalm.
“Because,” the prince said, “we’ll need a human to go before us when we’ve finished here. I’ll need him to arrange passage, to care for the crates, to secure a proper dwelling just as my last servant did. And sometimes I forget how humans think, I forget what their needs are, what motivates them. Having one of them here is essential. Look on Roach as a…a mascot.”
Kobra stared down at his knuckles.
“You are at my right hand, Kobra. You’re inexperienced yet, but before we’re through you’ll lead my army to victory…”
Kobra looked up again, his eyes shining like headlights.
“Yes!” Vulkan said. “I called you from Mexico because I could feel your presence, and the Headmaster helped me find you. Even as one of them you knew how to use Death. You were a true brother, even as a human.” He placed his fingertips together and looked from Kobra to Roach. “To each their special place. Think back to Alexander…”
“Who?” Kobra asked.
Vulkan looked shocked. “Alexander! The boy king, the greatest warrior this world has ever seen! Don’t you read? Don’t you know anything about military strategy?” His lips curled in answer to his own question. “No, I suppose not. You’ll have to be taught, won’t you? Alexander the Great carried a full contingent on his campaigns—archers, infantry, carpenters, cooks, scholars, prophets, even women to serve the needs of his men. He left nothing to chance, and each man knew his proper role. Am I less than Alexander? Would I not follow his example? As I say, to each their special purpose.”
Kobra shrugged. He didn’t know what the Master was talking about exactly, but if the Master said it was important, then it was. The Master closed his eyes now, leaving Roach to fawn at his feet. Kobra didn’t like that one. On the way up the mountain, the human had sat behind him on his Harley, grasping him with hot hands. If Kobra hadn’t already fed tonight, he might’ve borne him down to the ground and…but no. The Master wouldn’t like him even thinking like that; he wouldn’t like it at all. But he still couldn’t see what good that one was going to be. He would be slow and stupid, a lap dog trying to keep up with wolves. Already Kobra was delirious with the sense of power that coursed through him. Right after he fed, he felt invincible, tuned like a perfect chopper flying along the hot currents on the highway, able to concentrate on the glittering plain of the city and pick up bits of a hundred thousand conversations going on all at once, like overlapping radio stations that faded in and out when the antenna moved. It must have been easy for the Master to find him just by concentrating on the feeling Kobra had in his brain, the dark attitude under the trapdoor of his soul. Every time he fed, the power was going to grow stronger; he was going to learn more, see more, know all the secrets in human hearts and minds. It would take time, yes, but he was going to be twenty forever, and time coupled with ageless youth was the great gift the Master had bestowed on him.
“Leave me,” Vulkan said. He opened his eyes and stared at Kobra. “Take Roach to his quarters. See that no harm comes to him.”
Kobra stood up. “Come on,” he said to Roach. He motioned with his hand, and the man scurried after him. “No one is to touch him, Kobra,” Vulkan ordered. “Do you understand that? He is to have free run of the castle, and the one who touches his flesh or blood will answer to me.”
Kobra bowed his head slightly and ushered Roach through the door. It closed behind them with a hollow noise that echoed up toward the vaulted ceiling.
Prince Vulkan turned his head and stared into the fire. He thought he’d felt a cold breath stirring across the back of his neck, and his senses snapped on, vivid and aware. Paige LaSanda’s blood thrummed in his veins; it had made him sleepy for a while, but now he sat straight-backed, the pupils of his cat eyes slowly widening. The red embers in that fire reminded him of the ironsmith’s forge in his father’s castle, a long time ago. He remembered watching the ironsmith—a huge bear of a man with gray hair on his arms and shoulders—hammering out the raw blades that the swordsmith would painstakingly fashion into rapiers that glimmered like blue lightning. And he recalled those afternoon drills in a dusty hall with the sunlight streaming in through high, arched windows. Forward and back, forward and back, parry, thrust, attack. His father had been proud of his progress and proclaimed him an even better swordsman than his own father, Simon Vulkan the Strong. Now his father had been dust for many hundreds of years; now the castle of his birth was so many broken stones on a mountain ridge; now the pieces of the carriage that had crashed over a serpentine road on that wild, windswept night lay in a Budapest museum along with other odd memorabilia of the Vulkan brood. That night—September 29, 1342—had forever changed him and forever kept him the same. He remembered the scene vividly, could recall it down to the finest detail simply by closing his eyes. His father, Jon the Hawk, sitting across from him in the swaying, gold and ebony coach, his father’s wife Sonya beside her husband, pressed close to him because the storm made her fearful. Sonya the Barren, she was called in the village mead halls, though never loudly enough for any of the Hawk’s mercenaries to overhear. Conrad knew she wasn’t his mother. The Hawk was regaled by the minstrels for his prowess in bed as well as on the battlefield. Sonya bore him no grudge because the Hawk was aging now and had needed a son.
The land was a wild, crazy quilt of powers, men building mountain fortresses and calling themselves kings and hiring mercenaries to take the next man’s land. The Vulkan province had spread in all directions as far as a horseman could ride in a day, encompassing a great deal of what is now the northern part of Hungary. It was a varied landscape of harsh rock citadels, sudden deep valleys of dense, unexplored woodland, grassy plains, and lakes that caught mirror images of the sky. The land was beautiful, though unforgiving, but never at peace; there were very few nights when the torches of some ragged army or another didn’t burn along the strategic mountain passes. The Germanic tribes were always on the march, and if the Hawk was not battling them in the wild northern forests, he was faced with the crawl of the Huns or the mercenary army of some jealous neighbor.
As the Hawk grew older and slower, assassination attempts became bolder. Three nights before that fateful coach trip, returning from the new fortifications the Hawk had built on the eastern frontier where groups of barbarians had been seen
gathering in the mountains for a raid, one of his most trusted advisors had been caught rimming a wine goblet with poison. The man’s arms and legs were torn from their sockets, his mutilated torso thrown to the castle dogs. Such was the fate of all traitors.
Conrad Vulkan had been weaned on warfare, drilled in classical military strategy by such warriors as Jozsef Agna and Ernst the One-Eyed, taught to ponder the scope of his world by the philosopher Bran Lazlo, tutored in the myriad ways of man at the knee of his father. He was destined for greatness, the Hawk had always said. Conrad’s mind had been steadily honed like the blade of a newly fired rapier. Even now, sitting in a high-backed chair worlds away from strife-torn Hungary, he recalled a favorite lesson his father had taught him: Attack like the wind. Seem to be in all places at once. And never be there when the enemy turns to grasp at you.
Before the coach incident there was only one moment of foreboding in Conrad’s life. It happened during the celebration of his tenth birthday in the castle’s great hall. One of the guests had brought, as a gift, a gypsy woman who read fortunes in the palm of the hand. In the ruddy light of hearth and torch, she had grasped his wrist and bent over to see, her toothless gums masticating raw tobacco. Instantly she’d recoiled and asked him—through a translator because she spoke only a crude, Germanic gypsy language—if he’d had those few hairs at the center of his palm since he was born. He’d nodded, and she’d begun clucking like a frightened hen. She’d gripped his hand and said something else, which when translated conveyed that she saw a great and terrible change ahead for him. His line of life had hardly begun when it seemed to disappear under the flesh and manifested itself in a thin, blue thread that curved around the base of the thumb and circled the wrist once, twice, three times, and again. She refused to read anything more and had been sent on her way with a loaf of black bread.
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