Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “Abraham Lincoln said: ‘I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.’”

  “Yes? Well, Shakespeare wrote that ‘nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.’ Show them your power first. You can then afford mercy later.”

  “Mercy is power, Kurt. In showing the Polidoris mercy, I was showing everyone else my strength. I don’t think ole Freddy felt I was being kind. And I doubt anyone getting a good look at Yuler thought he was getting any kind of charity, whatsoever.”

  My seneschal nodded grudgingly.

  “I’m not going to play the role of brutal dictator here. If I can’t do it my way I’ll walk away.”

  I could feel him shaking his head inside the pounding of my own. “You cannot walk away.”

  “I won’t be another Elizabeth Báthory. I won’t become Vlad Drakul the Fifth.”

  “No,” he said sadly. “You are somewhat cleverer than either in your own way. And, in a sense, they are both your parents. You are already turning into a monster. Someday you will be more terrible than the two of them joined together.”

  Now there was a happy thought. I had come to New York to face down my enemies. With apologies to Pogo, my most dangerous foe waited for me in the future.

  Myself.

  Chapter Eleven

  “An hour’s rest,” the doctor was saying as he closed his medical case. “And I want the lights off. You’ll heal much quicker in the dark.”

  I nodded absently. I had the telephone receiver to my ear and was having a simultaneous conversation with another doctor, Dr. Burton, who was inexplicably back in Seattle.

  “It sounds as if the silver compounds in your tissues and bloodstream have intensified in their toxicity,” he was saying. “Some unique quality in your hemoglobin appears to be transmuting its properties in ways that human or vampire or lycanthrope blood wouldn’t. Perhaps when you ingested the blood of Elizabeth Báthory—”

  “She wasn’t the Countess Báthory,” I corrected, “she was a demon posing as my great-great-ancestor. And it wasn’t her body that I drank from; it was one of her meat-puppets.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “But as the demon moved from host to host, that body was physically transformed, right down to the cellular level. She was onboard and fully invested when you drank from Chalice Delacroix’s body. You drank demon’s blood, once removed, charged with preternatural essences that we can’t even begin to dream of, much less categorize. Perhaps your body is utilizing the silver as a defense mechanism.”

  “Against Lupé? Look, Doc, mixed marriages are hard enough without us not even being able to touch each other. You gotta do something!”

  “I can’t come to New York without my Doman’s permission. Why don’t you ask Stefan? But I have to warn you, I’m really operating in the dark, here. And New York has labs and doctors—”

  “Yes, we do,” agreed the other doctor who was standing by the door. “And we’ll be happy to start working on your problem once you’ve fully recuperated. Now hang up the phone and rest before your first appointment.”

  I held up my hand to show I was getting there. “What about Lupé, Doc? How is the baby?”

  There was a long pause. “We don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “She’s gone. And we don’t know where. We think she’s gone back to her pack, her family.” I saw the New York physician’s highly sensitive ears prick up at that.

  “Just a moment.” I turned to the doctor standing at my door. “Is there anything else, doctor?”

  “I—er—that is—I just want to say that you were very clever in stopping your own bleeding tonight. The clotting sacks under your tongue are unusually developed and your enzyme output must be triple that of any vampire I’ve ever examined.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s because Mother Nature has designed us to make things bleed. Rudimentary clotting sacks are just an evolutionary afterthought if you ask me.”

  “Well, you are unique. And it was sheer genius to use your own saliva to accelerate the mending of your throat. I’d like to study—”

  “I’d like to finish this call,” I said harshly. “Please turn off the lights on your way out, doctor. And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that anything heard inside this room is privileged information.”

  “Oh, yes. Patient confidentiality is a staple of the medical oath.”

  “It’s more than that, Sawbones. It’s the most powerful member of your enclave giving you a warning.”

  “Yes. Yes, sir! Good night!” He flipped the wall switch and closed the door, plunging the room into darkness.

  I put the receiver back to my ear. “Gerald . . . don’t leave. She’s not hereslf right now and I’m not sure her family is really going to help her.”

  “Ask Pagelovitch. He’ll be visiting in the next day or two.”

  “I will. Tell her . . .”

  There was the sound of breathing on the connection—mine, not his.

  “Christopher?”

  “Just call me if you hear anything.” I hung up.

  I stared at the soft glow of the phone’s touchpad floating just above the nightstand and considered fumbling down, next to it, for the bucket on the floor. They had taken me at my word when I requested a pail of blood. I had spoken in hyperbole but I ended up drinking most of the contents like a man dying of thirst. How anyone could ingest that much at one sitting was beyond my understanding.

  But not, apparently, beyond my need.

  And I was still thirsty!

  I no longer felt weak, just tired. There was a difference. And I no longer hurt, I just ached. Another difference. Like Bilbo Baggins, I felt thin and stretched, only instead of butter I felt like strawberry jam spread across too much toast. Once a healing blanket, the darkness was now like an empty vacuum, a starless void in the deepest regions of space. I felt nebulous, dissipated in entropic heat-death. Fading into eternal oblivion.

  Only there was a star.

  A single point of light that flickered and grew like a distant nova.

  The star became a nebula, a nebulous display of the Northern Lights.

  Lime green . . .

  Rippling into a distortion of . . . a suit and tie and broad-brimmed hat!

  The Kid was materializing in the darkness like the midnight reflection of neon lights in a dark puddle. My subconscious guilt manifesting on the borderline of consciousness? An undigested bit of blood, a blot of plasma, a crumb of platelets? Manifestation of gravy or of grave?

  “How now, spirit,” I croaked, “whither wander you?”

  The apparition made no answer but flickered at the sound of the door whispering open. It disappeared and all was darker than dark as I heard the door close again with a quiet click.

  Bare feet padded across the floor and I was momentarily distracted by the fact that I could actually hear the difference between shod and unshod footsteps on the carpet.

  Now another sound: a rustle. Clothing, sliding, dropping to the floor.

  An intake of breath.

  And the rich, warm smell of blood!

  I could still detect the scent of the cold, coagulating remnants of the bucket’s contents. This, however, was a heady brew of meaty odors, the juice of life, still living, still vital, immediate and hasty from the vein!

  It drew closer and the edge of the mattress depressed as another body joined mine on the bed.

  Deirdre had come to offer me the enhanced healing properties of my untainted blood, my former gift that now circulated in her transformed body.

  Her hand touched my bare chest and she moved to straddle me, both of us performing a blind dance in the dark, our hands scouting ahead to show us the way.

  She pulled my head to her throat and I licked at the flow that had already collected in the hollow between her collarbones.

  The blood filled my mouth, washing over my tongue like a tsunami of napalm. I swallowed liquid fire and, for a moment, I recalled Yuler Polidori’s conto
rted face, his steaming mouth blistered and bubbling as my own blood burned him from the inside out. But this was different. This blood was potent and cleansing, like a whiskey astringent, revving up the tiny motors of each cell it touched. I felt like a volcano erupting in reverse and knew that this was something that passed beyond the psychosexual excitations of undead bloodlust. A steady diet from these veins would either burn me up in six months or keep me young and vigorous for a thousand years!

  And that is when I realized that I couldn’t be tasting my own recycled blood in Deirdre’s body.

  That blood had its own potency. Mine had resurrected the dead and turned the undead back into the living. It was powerful and unique and, according to some, even sacred.

  But this was something different. It had a different brand of potency. It tasted forbidden. Felt secret and nearly unattainable. It was an elixir untasted by the wampyr or they would have kept stories about it. Hell, they would have written songs about it, fought wars over it, razed empires to acquire it.

  It wasn’t human blood.

  And it wasn’t Deirdre that I was drinking from.

  It took every bit of willpower I possessed to pull my bloody lips away and gasp: “Who . . . ?”

  “Meow,” answered Suki’s voice.

  * * *

  Jhojie Selangor was nervous. She kept looking around the private reception room at the security guards that Kurt had insisted on posting.

  “Don’t worry about them,” I said, smiling and trying to put her at ease. “They’re just here for show. They’re really nothing more than Teletubbies with fangs.”

  Deirdre smirked. She lounged in a chair to my left. Kurt was ensconced in the chair on my right, trying to suppress a scowl. I had agreed to their presence on the condition that neither would speak unless spoken to. I wasn’t worried about the two-tailed cat that was curled beneath my chair. She had plenty of room to stretch: if I ever got back home I would have to tell Boo that the whole “throne” issue was literal as well as metaphorical.

  I knew I wasn’t endearing myself to my bodyguards with the Teletubbies remark but I had other people’s feelings to consider. The Szekely Clan had served as the demoness Lilith’s enforcers—sort of an undead Gestapo who kept the malcontents in line and performed whatever unpleasantness was required to prop up her reign of terror. Given the fact that the New York (or any other) demesne was made up of scary creatures, it naturally followed that the enforcers had to be even scarier.

  Now that ole warm and cuddly me had taken the place of the Blood Countess from Hell, there was still the issue of the Szekely reputation. The junkyard might have a kindler, gentler owner, now, but the junkyard dogs were the same old, rabid pit bulls.

  To a certain degree that worked in my favor. As long as I could trust the Szekely oath of fealty, that is. But it also had its drawbacks. As long as my subjects suspected that I was nothing more than a puppet or a tool of the Hungarian mafia, they weren’t about to get real confidential. So my first order of business was to work at gaining the trust of the various clans as I met with their representatives.

  This wouldn’t be easy with the head of the Szekely Clan sitting at my right hand.

  I had to convince some that I wasn’t the Devil incarnate.

  I needed to assure others that I could be utterly ruthless when necessary.

  And I had to figure out when to be what to which.

  As a succession of private audiences with the various clan and demesne representatives progressed through the early hours of the morning, I found it necessary to wear a number of different faces and take a diversity of different tones with my various supplicants.

  Right now I was trying to be all reassuring. The last time I had been this close to Ms. Selangor, I had stepped in and yanked her head off. Of course we had rehearsed the whole thing a couple of hours before the reception, but she still wasn’t quite sure what sort of a devil she was making a deal with.

  Jhojie Selangor had been born in Malaysia back in the early 1960s. She had immigrated to the United States as a young woman—the result of one of the Internet’s “foreign brides for American men” services. She had listed on her application form that she wished to marry a “nice, clean American man who needed plenty of care and loving.”

  Even though she was less photogenic than some of the other Malaysian brides-in-waiting she had her pick of responding pen pals. She didn’t mention that her main reason for leaving the country of her birth involved persecution. Or that she had been driven out of three different villages by the time she was nineteen.

  Jhojie Selangor was a Pênanggalan.

  The undead of Malaysia fall into five groups derived from three different species. There are the Langsuyar and the Pontianak, who are distant relatives of the Greek Lamiai. The Polong and the Pelesit, who are small, animallike blood drinkers. And the Pênanggalan, who are as unique a creature as you are likely to find in the vampire kingdom.

  A Pênanggalan is always female. By day she appears to be a normal woman and has no fear of the sun. At night, however, her true nature is revealed as soon as she finds a secluded spot for her body to rest. Her head then separates from her body and flies off, trailing its entrails like some horrific jellyfish, in search of prey. The head must return and rejoin its body before sunrise or it will be destroyed. Granted, not your typical East European undead profile, but it made her an ideal clan leader and representative for the Morlocks.

  Not to mention our little guerrilla theatre during tonight’s reception.

  Other immigrant undead had largely folded themselves into the ethnic communities of their human origin: the Mamuwaldes were based in Morningside Heights and Harlem, the Tlahuelpuchis in El Barrio and Jackson Heights, the Aluka on the Lower East Side as well as Borough Park and Williamsburg, the Chiang-shih in Chinatown and Flushing while the Kyuketsukis favored the more exclusive Riverdale area. Then there were the Bavas in Little Italy and Bensonhurst, the Dearg-dul in Hell’s Kitchen and Five Points, the Rakshasis and Vetalas in the East Village with some encroachment on Flushing, the Nachtzehrers in Yorkville, and the Upír who had moved from East 97th Street out to Brighton Beach. The Loogaroo, Sukuyan, and Asema clustered along Eastern Parkway between Grand Army Plaza and Utica Avenue; the Gronnskjegg in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. The Vjeszczi preferred Greenpoint while Atlantic Avenue and Midwood was home to the Oneidas. Astoria, Queens was overrun with the Vrykolakas.

  The “family” clans varied a little more in ethnicity and, to some extent, species. The Polidoris’ turf was the Upper East Side. The Le Fanus slept in penthouse coffins in Upper Midtown. The Szgany were Gypsies and had spread throughout The Village and Soho. The previous Doman had called the Szekely Clan to be her pit bulls of the damned and their kennels were now on the Upper West Side.

  And then there were those clans who did not identify themselves by a particular ethnicity. There were the gangs like The Deads and The Hammers. And The Ladies of the Night who were actually, as you might suppose, “ladies of the night.”

  And, of course, the Morlocks.

  Jhojie Selangor presided over a microcosmic melting pot of those immigrants and cast-offs that had no single ethnic, cultural, physical, or metaphysical tribe with which they could find fraternity or commonality. With no single neighborhood in which to blend, they had taken their place beneath the streets of the city, dwelling underground much like H.G. Wells’ fictional troglodytes from which they took their name. At once feared and scorned for their differences, their leader explained that they most longed for a sense of legitimacy. They wanted recognition from the other clans that the Morlocks had equal birthrights among the families of the night. She hoped that the new Doman would make a place for them at the big boys’ table.

  It seemed a reasonable request, an agenda I would push regardless. But it didn’t hurt that I owed her one for the head-popping turn at my coming out party.

  My next appointment, Silvanio Malatesta, had trained most of his life to become a monster. He just s
pelled it with a b instead of an n.

  As a kid he had run with a succession of street gangs until he was old enough to attract the attention of the mafia (which, like vampires, doesn’t really exist either). He worked his way up through the ranks until he became an underboss for one of “those families.” Back in the heyday—the Forties for Silvanio, when he was still Warm—he had discovered the inhabitants of another underworld.

  These piazzaiollos were worse than the Sicilians—they had no fear of the gun or the knife and he lost several good men and more than a few street punks before he learned their dark and terrible secrets. Silva did not understand how such creatures came to be but he did understand power. These Bava had it and he wanted it. You gave up certain things to acquire power, everything in life is a trade-off: Non c’è rosa senza spine.

  But what would he really be giving up? Silva worked nights and preferred to sleep late anyway. The priests had said he was going to Hell while he was still a young boy and, by the time he became a made man, he had long said goodbye to his own soul. Near invulnerability to bullets, superhuman strength and speed, the power to cloud the minds of the simple and superstitious—why would anyone not accept this Dark Gift? Not that it was being offered, you understand; it had to be bargained for. But Malatesta was a man who had learned how to get what he wanted regardless of the cost or what others wanted. He was brought over.

  The Family should have considered him their greatest asset. Instead, they feared and loathed what he had become. Old World superstitions and Catholicism were arrayed against the advantages he felt he had to offer.

  But the division ran deeper than that.

  The Dark Gift had changed him in ways he had not reckoned. A cataloging of the physical transformations did not take into account the mental and emotional changes that were taking place, as well. He had thought himself a “cold-blooded killer” before, never imagining how the literal version of those words would remake him and all of his future plans. The Dark Gift does not serve humans; it is humans who must serve the Dark Gift. Silvanio Malatesta gave up his position of underboss for La Costa Nostra. He severed his ties to his former Family by severing their jugulars. Now he was godfather for the Bava, gangsters with fangs. Fangsters. The New York demesne had its own mafia now. And Malatesta came to our audience wanting to know if the new Doman was going to muscle in on his turf.