“And one cannot help but wonder where your young hound Darcy has gotten to, Szekely,” Valentine drawled on his way back from the closing door. “Are the rumors true? Has she flown the nest? Does she seek to ally herself with the wolves? Or has she been working for this cursed Cairn all along?”
Kurt stiffened in his chair. “How dare you!”
“How dare I?” Valentine waved a limp hand. “How about how dare we? The gossip has gone throughout the five boroughs and beyond.”
Silvanio made a stab at playing the statesman. “If it’s true that she shot Domo Cséjthe we are hardly prepared to condemn her. Each Doman rises to power by eliminating his or her predecessor. Perhaps she was acting on another’s behalf. Yours, Domo Szekely?”
“You presume too much!”
“Do we? Because if she did not attack our Doman on your orders one must ask who she is working for.”
“And whether you can adequately serve any Doman,” a tall, black man wearing a green suit, added, “if you can develop such a blind spot.”
“It is a fact that your brother perished the same night as Domo Cséjthe was taken down, n’est-ce pas?” This from a small, dark woman in lavender taffeta.
“Your point?” Kurt grumbled.
“Well,” said Valentine, “whoever becomes Doman might be well advised to appoint a better advisor.”
“Perhaps it is better for you if the half-blood does not return,” Dante mused. “He might blame you for the misfortunes that have befallen him.”
Blackstar chimed in with: “You’ve been the obedient lapdog, Szekely, but would you willingly bare your throat for him?”
They were all ganging up to back him into a corner but Kurt showed he had lost neither his political nor street fighter’s instincts as he steepled his fingers and said: “Assuming we were to agree that we are, once again, without a Doman . . . how would the families come to an agreement regarding a replacement?”
That did it. Too many clans would lose big in the one-vote-to-a-member model. The squabbling commenced with Kurt watching the various family heads while Suki watched Friederich.
Polidori ended up just staring at the floor.
Eventually there was a lull in the threats and oaths and half-baked plans. Carmella had joined Suki in regarding Polidori’s contemplative mood and took the opportunity to address him. “You have been silent, my lord Friederich. What are your thoughts on these matters?”
“I thought,” said Kurt, “that we were here to listen to a message from our Doman through his representative here.”
“She’s not his representative,” someone called from the back, “she’s Pagelovitch’s proxy from Seattle!”
“Nonetheless—” Kurt began.
Suki reached over and touched his arm. “I’ll gladly yield the floor to Master Polidori.”
Friederich seemed to shake himself from his reverie and slowly rose from his chair.
“My lords and ladies,” he began after a moment’s meditation, “I have held my tongue while you have discussed these matters of import and now I ask you to cede me the floor for a few brief minutes that I may make my thoughts clear to you. I ask that you listen to what I have to say without interruption so that I may finish quickly and succinctly—then you may discuss my words and decide as you will.” He looked around the room. “Are my terms reasonable to the rest of you?”
Heads began to nod but Carmella smirked and said, “You worry me, Polidori. It is not like you to ‘ask our leave.’”
“Ah, but it is like you, Carmella, to interrupt and so I ask your indulgence just this once.”
She disliked that comeback but closed her mouth and nodded.
“Let me begin with a simple statement. Your Doman, Christopher L. Cséjthe, is alive and well. And he is anxious to address the heads of the clans and families on several key issues.”
No one kept their word: the room erupted into a cacophony of shouted questions and half-muttered oaths. Polidori made no attempt to answer any of them or be heard over the din. Eventually, he sat down and waited. Eventually the room grew quiet as the rest of the representatives realized they would learn nothing as long as their own mouths were open.
“I know the questions you have and those questions will be answered if you will just be patient and listen and—” Polidori’s voice became very quiet so that the others had to strain to hear his words, “—pay very close attention.
“As I was saying, your Doman is alive and has several key issues to discuss with you. But first you should know of recent events. He has faced and defeated The Mangler, also known as Doctor Pipt, also known as the Nikidik, better known to history as the infamous Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele. It was he who sent the cybernetic creatures against our Doman’s homes here in New York and back in Louisiana. Cséjthe’s victory came at a terrible cost but it has also resulted in enhanced powers and abilities that he did not possess previously. Among the Northern Wilderness Clans, he is now known as Chixu Manitou and is called ‘Bloodwalker.’ The reason for this shall shortly be obvious.”
Cries of “Where is he?” and “Why should we take your word for it?” interrupted and Polidori made as if to sit down again but the room quickly grew quiet.
“You think our demesne is impregnable,” Polidori continued, “but it is not. Our security protocols are designed to warn us of even our own comings and goings—they are not foolproof. Your Doman has returned to New York and has walked among you this evening. He walks about even now.”
Again the room erupted and Polidori had to sit down this time. It took several minutes of shouted exhortations for everyone else to shut up to accomplish just that.
“Where is he?” Valentine growled as the room fell silent.
“I cannot say it aloud but, if you will come over here,” Polidori said, “I will whisper the answer in your ear.”
Scowling to show his disdain, nevertheless, Valentine got up and strode impatiently to the head of the Polidori family. Friederich stood and leaned toward Carmella’s brother who turned and cocked his head to receive the information. He opened his mouth as if to whisper, then dropped his jaw and struck like a viper, burying his fangs in Valentine’s neck.
There was no real struggle. One moment a Polidori was clamped to a Le Fanu neck, the next the former was on the floor while the latter staggered toward his sister.
Carmella was unprepared for the assault on her brother. She was even less prepared for her brother’s assault on herself. His teeth were in her throat before she could even cry out. The two nearest clan leaders stepped in to separate them. One ended up with an unconscious Valentine, the other with a bloody-minded Carmella. The attacks unfolded like a chain reaction of fang-to-throat quickies diagrammed by Rube Goldberg and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Each attack lasted mere seconds and then turned upon another victim as soon as the victim in question was unfanged. In short order nearly sixteen family, gang, and tribe representatives were left bloody and gasping in various states of disarray across aisles, chairs and floor.
Silvanio Malatesta got up, brushed himself off, and walked up to the front of the room. “Go sit with the others,” he told Kurt.
The seneschal, as yet untouched and unbloodied, looked up at the undead gangster as if to measure his chances for one-on-one combat. Malatesta shook his head and said, “Please. Your Doman commands it.” Kurt got up slowly and moved to the nearest seat in the front row.
Suki stood as Malatesta turned to her. “Go,” he said, “it is time.” He leaned in and whispered: “Fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops.”
As Suki left the room he turned and sat down in the Doman’s chair of judgment.
“As most of you now know, I am your Doman. At least the mind of Chris Cséjthe, anyway. For the moment I speak to you from Silvanio Malatesta’s body. I entered the room a short while ago in Friederich Polidori’s flesh. During our little exercise a few moments ago, I passed though the minds and bodies of most of the full-blooded vampires in this room. While I was visiti
ng, I was in full control of your flesh just as I’m playing puppet master for Malatesta now. Any questions so far?”
Well, of course there were questions but those would be asked later. For now everyone was too stunned to do anything but try to absorb this sudden turn of events.
“I’m not the man I was four days ago. Not just in what I can now do but in how I now feel. The first thing you need to fully understand is what I am capable of. I can, if I wish, take your body when I please and you cannot stop me. While I am wearing it, I can use it to torch your nests, drain your children, and then take a little stroll outside on a bright, sunny day. Right after I pop out of your dissolving, carbonized remains I can go and pop inside of the next vampire I take a shine to.
“Are we clear so far?”
There were a few stunned nods.
“Perhaps you did not understand my question. Do you understand that I can show up inside your heads unannounced, wreak bloody havoc, and disappear again without effort or cost to myself?”
Heads were nodding all around now. It looked like a bobble-head convention.
“Good. Because the other change is just as important. As I said, I’m not the same guy I was four days ago. Back then I was essentially the Rodney King of fangdom, just wishing we could all get along. Guess what? You have a new Doman now and the survivors will all get along.”
I let that word “survivors” hang out there for a moment for them all to contemplate.
“Rule number one,” I continued, “anyone who doesn’t follow the rules is gone. No ‘ifs,’ ‘ands’ or ‘buts.’”
“Gone . . .” someone murmured.
I nodded Malatesta’s head. “Gone. Not ‘banished.’ Not ‘kicked out.’ Not designated ‘rogue.’ Just . . . ‘gone.’”
“How will you know,” Blackstar Sabertooth asked, “if one of our gang members doesn’t fully sign on?”
I made Malatesta grin what I hoped was a truly unpleasant grin. “Word gets around. One of the other clans or gangs or families produces evidence. Then that group is . . . gone.”
Eyes goggled.
“Don’t you mean that individual?” Dante countered with an uncertain glower.
I shook my head, all pleasantness. “No. It is up to you to see that all of your people are on board. If a member of your gang looks like he or she might betray the cause, it’s up to you to make them ‘gone’ before I find out and make all of The Deads dead and gone. Capeesh?”
Polidori was picking himself up off the floor. He shook his head as if to clear the last vestiges of my intruding consciousness from his skull. “You threatened severe consequences the other night and then allowed Yuler to live after his attempt on your life. Why should we believe you now?”
“Because I hitched a little ride in your head to get into the room, Freddie-boy, so you should know how deadly serious I am, this time. All these past months of you guys sending assassins after me, playing politics once I was here, pushing to see if I would push back—you know what? I get it. You guys are predators. You’re hard-wired for it. And, as if the bloodlust wasn’t enough, all that preternatural power tends to corrupt.
“You should be proud of yourselves: you’re a great bunch of teachers and I think I’m ready to graduate and apply what I’ve learned now. You’ve convinced me that I really can’t do this any other way.
“Now, rule number two: no more killing humans.” I expected the room to erupt like Mount Krakatoa but they all just sat there and glowered at me like students trapped in after-school detention. “I’m not forbidding you to hunt or feed. But I know that it can be done without killing. So no killing the warms.”
“Not even in self-defense?” someone asked from the second row.
“Self-defense is like the insanity defense. You can only invoke it once and then the odds are seriously against your acquittal. So don’t get in a ‘kill or be killed’ situation—you’re only postponing your own execution.
“Rule number three: undead birth control. No more adding to the ranks of the undead without my permission.”
“We have to ask your permission to sire?”
Malatesta and I nodded together.
“Won’t that get a little complicated?”
We shook our head. “Not really. The answer will be ‘no,’ ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And that’s if I’m feeling generous.”
“Anything else?” Valentine asked dourly.
I stopped smiling and the real Malatesta down in the crypt of his hindbrain whimpered. “Yeah. There was supposed to be. Rule number one was supposed to be no one—NO ONE—was to lay a finger on my wife or child . . .”
Carmella’s face registered a mixture of distaste and disbelief. “The wolfbitch was your wife?”
I was down off the dais and plowing through the chairs in the blink of an eye. My own arm couldn’t have raised Valentine’s sister off her feet and held her struggling in midair. Malatesta’s could and did. “She would have been my wife,” I growled, pulling Carmella’s face close to the undead mask I wore for the moment. “But someone sent assassins with silver bullets and poisoned more than just my blood. She would have been my wife and I would have been with her instead of leaving her to die alone and unprotected!” I hurled her across the room and turned on the others. “In case you haven’t been taking notes, I’m internalizing a great deal of rage right now! If anyone else would like to tap into that, I could use the catharsis!”
No one moved. No one said bupkis.
I turned and started to walk toward the door.
“Is that it?” someone whispered in the back.
I stopped. “No. That is not it. That’s just for starters. But lest you think I’m all about punishment, there will also be rewards. For those who are my eyes and ears, those who bring me word or evidence of any that speak rebelliously, that plot in secret, that might be my enemy now or in days to come—I know how to reward, just as I know how to punish.”
I turned back toward the exit. “Sunrise is coming and I have other things to do yet tonight, as well as tomorrow. I will meet with you all again in three nights. For now I wish to be alone.”
It would all begin here in a few days if not a few hours, I thought. Chaos, panic, rage, disorder, and the preemptive betrayals: my work here was done. I took three steps before the door flew open and vomited broken, bloody vampires.
“Cséjthe!” an inhuman voice bellowed from beyond. A bat-headed silhouette filled the opening and then some.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was just a moment, a couple of eye blinks really. First the hulking brute was outside in the cramped corridor, peering through the too-small egress at the lot of us.
Then it was in the room with us.
It should have taken out half the wall to do so. I didn’t doubt that it could. Aside from the old werewolf’s testimony regarding another house investment gone bad, the creature had arms that made the fire department’s Jaws of Life look like chopsticks.
But the demon merely stepped through the opening. And, for just the briefest of moments, I thought I saw a small, neatly dressed man take its place.
There was nothing small or neat about the behemoth that crouched past the threshold, however. It was as if some demented genetics lab had blended bat and human DNA in ways that only Bruce Wayne could imagine in his darkest nightmares, and then gene-spliced the growth hormones of an African elephant into the mix. Its head was the size of a wrecking ball—and that did not include the large, tufted ears that erupted from the sides of its skull like inverted jet engine scoops. Its nose was like a flint knife, its teeth like the stalactites of the underworld realms that spawned it. The creature half squatted on legs that were, each, as big around as a human torso. Leathery wings draped beneath furry arms that could tear a man in two without flexing. And over one of those massive shoulders was draped the lower half of a human body.
My human body—if I recognized the clothing I had dressed in just a couple of hours before.
“Cséjt
he!” It bellowed again, casting about the room like a hound dog hoping to pick up a scent.
I looked at the rest of the vampires in the room.
They looked back at me.
I could order them to defend their Doman.
Yeah, right. They were probably thinking that batboy was the answer to all their prayers. It takes me out; they get to go back to the big blood orgy.
Since taking the demon on, myself, was obviously a no-win situation, that left me with taking the body I currently had and beating a hasty retreat. My original birthday suit could be counted as lost at this point but I could always dump Malatesta’s skin and find something more appropriate down the road.
The trouble was I was never very good at walking, much less running, away from no-win situations. More importantly, this bat-headed bastard had killed Lupé and Will.
“Over here, Zotz,” I said, and stepped back from the tangle of chairs so that there was open floor between us.
The rest of the vampires scrambled to the back of the room as the monster stomped toward me.
And then past me.
It moved up to the dais and, lifting my limp body from its plateaulike shoulder, placed it upon the throne. I looked nothing so much like I had dozed off during a tedious meeting.
It turned to Malatesta-me then and said, “Will you return to that which is yours?”
Well, hell, why not?
If I was going to die with my boots on, better they were on my feet than somebody else’s: a twist, a pop, a glide, and then splish-splash, I was taking a bath all inside my own little husk. My eyes popped open just in time to watch Malatesta keel over and then Batzilla loom over. His very size blotted out most of the light in the room.
Then his face was dropping toward me and all the lights went out.
* * *
You can’t imagine darkness as a human. You can only experience a certain lessening of light. Until you’ve gone down into the darkness under the earth, slept under a sky of earth and stone, where no breeze blows, no sound sighs, you do not know the darkness beyond the land of the living.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 44