Rousing a sleeping vampire before sunset is not supposed to be easy. Maybe Asian vampires are different: she sat right up as though sleep was an elusive commodity these days.
Rousing a sleeping vampire is supposed to be dangerous: they tend to attack upon awakening. Suki lunged at me immediately, wrapping her arms around my neck and applying enough pressure to crush the vertebrae of someone without my preternatural strength.
Before either of us could say anything, her posture stiffened: she had just realized that we were not alone.
And then she got a good look at what I had brought with me.
And screamed.
* * *
The bat guano had hit the fan in my absence.
According to Suki, Kurt had a pretty good idea that his “niece” was involved with Cairn. He just didn’t know that she claimed to “be” Cairn. Asking her any additional questions on the matter was difficult as she had disappeared after the multiple stun-gunning in my hospital room. No one knew whether she had hotfooted it out of town or was lurking around the next corner in disguise. The best he could do for the moment was keep any of the other family or clan leaders from guessing that a Szekely might be allied with their greatest enemy.
While Suki had been close enough to see Darcy point her gun at me and intervene, she hadn’t heard her actual confession. When I told her that Spook claimed to be the Vampire Boogeyman who had bedeviled the enclave for the past fifty years, Suki was taken aback.
“But that’s impossible!” she said. “Darcy’s human. She can’t be that old!”
“She’s not. It’s a multigenerational role. She mentioned her mother and her grandmother before she pulled the trigger,” I said. “Aside from the part of Cairn, ‘himself,’ I’ll bet she isn’t running this counterinsurgency all by herself. Other humans, maybe even other vampires, are involved. The Cairn persona—never seen, never heard—is a front but not a solitary person. The symbol cloaks a network that probably has moles within the various tribes and families.”
“This girl is good,” she agreed, “and the potential of additional operatives make her a more formidable opponent than anyone’s supposed. But she’s not your main problem, right now. The heads of the clans are putting pressure on Kurt to pronounce you lost or dead so a new Doman can be appointed.” She looked at me meaningfully.
I sighed. “It’s tempting. But I’d have to go back to a life of always looking over my shoulder—”
“You’re suggesting that there would be a difference if you stay and rule?” She was trying to regain her impassive mien but some incredulity leaked through.
“The difference is I do things on my terms. Before I’m done they’ll want me dead worse than if I just walked away.” I shrugged. “But I’ve been given a second chance. Or maybe a third . . .” I shook my head. “Hell, I don’t know: I may be on my fourth or fifth life, now. The point is there is more to my life—or even my unlife—than the brief time I spend running around in this carcass of flesh. And while I do still wear the flesh and the blood, I need to find a better use for it than just trying to hold on to it for a little bit longer.”
“So, you plan to win stars for your crown by playing high mucky-muck to the biggest, baddest vampire enclave in the Western Hemisphere?”
I hung my head and stared at the bedroom carpet. In spite of repeated scrubbings, residual elements of my bedtime snacks remained in faint, trace amounts here and there. “I don’t want the responsibility for a bunch of cold-blooded killing machines,” I said, “but I’m stuck no matter what. Walk away and let another Liz Báthory or Vlad Dracula take over and my karma is pretty much up on concrete blocks in the Backyard of Eternity. Stay and take direct accountability, I’ll lose what’s left of my soul in six months. I could become a bigger monster than either of them ever was.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Doesn’t matter. I do. Which is why I’ve got to pull the pin on the grenade.”
I heard the frown in her voice. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Nobody’s going to like it. That’s how I can be sure it’s the right thing to do.”
We sat in silence until Wendy entered the room.
“All tucked in,” she said. “Now what?”
I looked over at Suki. “You convince Kurt to call a meeting of all of the leaders—families, clans, tribes, gangs. Tell him to tell them that you have news of my—uh—disposition.”
“Your disposition is cranky as usual.”
I ignored that. “Try to make the meeting as late as possible. The closer to sunrise, the less recovery time everyone will have for a while.” I turned to Wendigo. “We’ll be leaving shortly after the meeting. I need for you to arrange transportation.”
“To the airport?” she asked.
“No. We’ll be driving, or have you forgotten?”
“Oh.”
“A large, windowless van would be preferable.” I got up and went over to rummage through my drawers. “Tinted windshield and movable seats. Curtain enclosures if possible. And sunblock. I’m going to need lots of sunblock.” I handed her a black plastic card. “Charge it.”
“I can steal the van. No paper trail.”
“I can afford to buy it. I can’t afford to take it.”
Wendy looked at Suki. “It’s a metaphysical thing,” the vampire said inscrutably. Wendy took the card without a word.
“Now, we need to pack and be ready to leave quickly . . .”
“So this is a retreat,” Suki argued.
“A strategic withdrawal,” I said. “I’m walking away, not running. And I’m still going to be Doman. At least for a while. If I survive.”
“It sounds like you actually have a plan for once.”
“I do.”
She shook her head. “Now I am scared!”
* * *
I slept, trying to grab whatever additional strength I could find before the night’s showdown. Unfortunately my bed proved less restful than the Wendigo’s jet stream redeye. I tossed and turned as a dark and terrible shape drew near in my dreams, a juggernaut of pain and death and fear that seemed close enough to reach out and pull me down into the cold dark depths of Cenote Camazotz now. It had stalked me through my dreams since I’d left Louisiana. I’d been free of its nightmare travails while out of my body but, now that I’d returned, it seemed to have homed in on my location and closed the distance rapidly. I awoke with the feel of its gory footprints tramping across my doorstep.
Was it real or imaginary?
The palpable despair that accompanied each of these sleeping visitations felt too vivid, too painful, to be the product of indigestion or unresolved issues in my subconscious. It felt . . . external. And it kept coming closer.
I sat on the edge of the great empty bed in the dark room and weighed the darkness and emptiness in myself. Did it matter? Nothing was changed except the heaviness of my heart. I had to stay and do what I had to do whether there really was a bat-headed demon with a grudge or not. I could hope to pull everything off and buy myself another six months or a year. That might be enough for the generations of humans who might otherwise die—or worse—if I took any of the easier ways.
But if this thing was real? I knew, instinctively, that I didn’t have a chance against something that old and powerful and consumed with rage and death.
“Give me time,” I prayed to the darkness and the emptiness. Not “let me live” or “escape.” What I needed was to be gone from New York before I met my fate or the plan would collapse like a house of cards.
Just give me enough time to do what’s important.
“Time, my lord?” asked a familiar voice.
I looked up. Someone was standing across the room. My tired, aching eyes switched over into the infrared spectrum and contemplated the human-shaped rainbow of yellow, orange and red.
“Deirdre?” I croaked.
“It’s Bethany, my lord.”
“Bethany?” My mind was fuzzier than my eyes; it took a
moment to click. White-blonde hair, Lutheran on the wine list. “Who sent you?”
“No one, Master. I felt your presence. I sensed your thirst.”
“My thirst.” It suddenly occurred to me that I had taken nothing in food or drink since reacquiring my body. And the last time I’d sat in the driver’s seat I’d found the bloodlust to be a constant buzz in the back of my head. Was the silver in my system dissipating and lowering my dependence on fresh infusions of hemoglobin? Was it a Zen thing, more physical mastery as a byproduct of astral progressions? Had an infusion of Michael’s “blood” healed more than a pesky little bullet lodged in my heart?
Or were tens of thousands of microscopic nanobots retuning my tissues to a different pitch, a different state of being? What were those little buggers doing inside of me, anyway?
“Are you not thirsty, my lord?”
I didn’t feel thirsty. I felt tired. But staring at the human-shaped candle flame in the darkness I realized that I needed more strength if I was to prevail over my opponents this evening. And that Bethany’s blood might be just what the doctor ordered.
“I have your teeth, here,” she said. And walked toward the bed with her arms out, trying to feel her way through the lightless void.
“Bethany,” I said, taking her by the hand, “you once told me that the money was very good for serving in the wine cellar.”
“Yes, Master.” She pressed the box into my hands as we sat back down together. “Enough to pay all of my debts, college loans, and live very, very well.”
“Ah.” I set the box aside for the moment and clasped her hands in mine. “So you’re a college student. What are you studying?”
“Architecture and design. At—at least, I was.”
“You’ve stopped.” It wasn’t a question and I could feel her nod in return without actually looking at her. “Well, it obviously wasn’t for a lack of funding . . . poor grades, perhaps?”
“Four-oh average.” Her voice was proud and yet wistful.
“Sorry, I had a feeling you were honor roll material. The thing is,” I squeezed her fingers, “a perfect grade point requires more than intelligence, it requires drive. You were motivated.” Again, it wasn’t a question but I let it hang in the air between us like one.
“Yes,” she said finally. “My lord, I am ready. Slake your thirst with my body.”
“In a moment,” I said. “I’m just curious. You seem bright, capable. Why waste your talents on something boring and dreary like architecture?”
“But it isn’t!” The colors in her head, neck, and chest burned more brightly. “It’s the perfect fusion of art and science! The utilization of space and materials, matched to human need in all axes: physical, emotional, psychological . . . spiritual . . .” She lapsed into a ten-minute lecture on the aesthetics of redesigning environments and their impact on the human condition, ranging from the individual to whole societies.
“So,” I asked when she finally paused to collect herself, “when did you finally fall out of love with it?”
“I—I—realized there wasn’t any point . . .”
“Becoming a bloodsucking creature of the night has derailed many a budding career,” I agreed.
“Will I be changed soon, Master?” Her voice had lost its vitality and gone dead, not with dread but with lack of purpose.
I turned and fumbled with the inlaid box in the dark. “We’ll see.” I slipped the exquisitely crafted fangs over my own dull teeth. “Give me your neck, child.”
She tilted her head back and I caught her upper back with my left arm. She was all unwrapped and ready: a dinner table from head to toe. Her throat arched toward my mouth but a neck wound always runs a high risk of bleeding out so I lowered my mouth to her shoulder. She sighed as my faux fangs pierced the trapezius muscle and, as her rare essence began to enter my mouth, I entered her mind.
It was different, this time. I wasn’t storming in to take over her flesh. I wasn’t pushing her consciousness down the cellar stairs and locking it in the basement of her hindbrain. And Bethany and I already shared a psychic connection from my previous feeding and reward session.
I was, however, doing something far more intimate this time than diddling her to a physical orgasm. I eased into the master bedroom of her subconscious and began to discreetly rearrange the furniture.
* * *
Friederich Polidori entered the council chamber late.
Not just fashionably late: the other family representatives had pressed Kurt to hear their grievances without waiting any longer and Christopher Cséjthe’s seneschal was well under siege when the head of the Polidori clan entered the soundproofed room draped with red satin curtains. It was the same room where I had received the heads of the various clans and families just a couple of nights before. The great throne was symbolically empty. Kurt Szekely sat in the large chair to its right. Suki was perched on the chair to its immediate left. The various representatives, numbering between fifteen and twenty-five, sat in curving rows of chairs facing the throne on the raised dais.
Polidori moved up the center aisle and found an empty chair on the front row but created scarcely a ripple in the debate with his passing.
“He’s dead and that’s the long and short of it,” Silvanio Malatesta was insisting. “We cannot wait any longer. A new Doman must take his place.” Heads nodded and voices murmured agreement around the room.
“He’s not dead!” Suki stood up from her seat near Kurt. “I have knowledge of his continued existence and his instructions for the Council!”
“My dear,” Carmella Le Fanu cooed, “even if we could trust something as tenuous as a blood-bond in this matter, you’ve admitted that he neither sired you, nor you, him. Unless you can produce the Doman in the flesh, some purported psychic connection is just not something that we can seriously consider.”
“The fact of the matter is that he was all but dead when he was abducted,” Malatesta elaborated. “He had no chance for survival in the hands of his friends and he’s been two days, now, in the hands of powerful enemies. He is either dead or as good as, for our concerns. A new Doman must arise and arise quickly!”
Kurt stirred from his position deep in the right-hand subthrone. “You seem awfully anxious, Silva. Could it be that you have designs on that role, yourself?”
The Bloodfather of the Bava opened his mouth but Dante Inferno jumped in. “We have good cause to be anxious, Szekely. These unnatural edicts from your half-human puppet need to be rescinded! The Lupin are restless and need to be reminded who holds power.”
“It’s not just that,” Valentine Le Fanu added. “There are rumors that the Doman got a wolfbitch with child.”
“What?”
“Abomination!”
“Impossible!”
While the majority of the room’s occupants were unanimous in expressing shock and outrage, Valentine moved to the back door and opened it. More Le Fanu clan members entered, flanking a tall, rangy man. A very familiar-looking, tall, rangy man. The shaggy widow’s peak, the angular ears, the overall impression of wax-resistant body hair—it was the man from my sewer dream, the one Lupé had called “Grandfather.”
Carmella stood as the older man was escorted up to stand next to her and the room quieted. “Why deal in rumor and gossip,” she announced, “when we can get a firsthand report?”
It was plain from the expression on his face that Kurt was caught off guard. He started to protest then realized that he wanted to know as much as anyone else. “Is it true, Silas?” he asked the older man. “We’ve heard stories that the Garou woman is pregnant with our Doman’s child. How is such a thing possible?”
Gramps, who looked like he’d been fed a regular diet of prunes and they were affecting him at both ends, shuffled his feet and growled: “I do not know . . .”
“The law . . .” someone hissed.
“We did not break faith!” he barked back. “She did! It was our intent to bring her to you for judgment!”
“Liar!” someone cried.
“Then where is she?” someone else asked.
“Dead,” Silas said.
“My, how convenient,” Blackstar Sabertooth purred. “Wouldn’t you say, Friederich?”
Friederich Polidori made no response beyond a silent impression of Yuler, after drinking my silver-laced blood.
“So where is the body?” Kurt queried. “You don’t expect us to take your story at face value without any evidence.”
“We could not—recover—the body.” The words came out of his throat, bitter and difficult. “Five of us died. The rest—barely escaped with our lives!”
“It sounds like,” the head of the Aluka said after a moment’s silence, “she put up a hell of a fight . . .”
His Oneidan counterpart nodded. “If we are to believe your account.”
“You know nothing!” the old werewolf roared back, additional fur beginning to carpet his cheeks and jaw line. “It was a demon! A monster from Hell come to punish her for her sins! It was our ill fortune to come between them when it attacked!”
And he launched into a detailed, horrific account of how a bat-headed demon plowed through a pride of were-warriors as if they were mere puppies. How it ripped a two-story house to shreds with its scaly, clawed hands to reach its ordained victim. And finally, after tossing two full-blooded vampires into the river as if they were newborn infants, how it carried Lupé Garou and her unborn child down into the bowels of the earth to meet the fate of those who break with the ancient laws and ways.
When he was done, no one seemed inclined to challenge the depth of horror and shame that radiated off of him throughout the telling. No one believed that it was a lie.
Kurt turned to the assemblage as the old man shuffled back out with his vampire escort. “It would appear that our problems with the Lupin are in abeyance for now—”
“But there is still the matter of Cairn—what is his part in all of this?” Carmella retorted. She still had not sat back down.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 43