Alek leaned forward. “Then you must believe me. I wouldn’t have come here looking for you if I thought it was a joke. Brett Edelman disclosed his plans to me personally.”
Paul’s eyes grew wider still behind the lenses of his Coke-bottle glasses. “To you?”
Alek nodded.
“Oh… my. Oh… well, this… this is unbelievable.”
“I know.”
“And wonderful.” Paul smiled.
Alek shook his head. “What?”
Paul shrugged. “I mean, I admit… it’s an interesting disguise… but you don’t really look human in that, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
His eyes gleaming with a kind of peculiar mirth, Paul leaned in close and whispered his next words in a conspiratorial tone. “I know about Brett’s plans. And I know what you are. But I had no idea he would act on it.”
“It?”
“The tape. I saw it. Well… part of it. The secretary who works for Brett at Summit Books is on my payroll. She keeps me abreast of Brett’s dealings, he’s such a conniving sonofabitch. I saw the tape, and naturally, when he approved of my plans to drop out of society, I knew he was up to something. I’ve worked with the man for over 14 years now and you get to know someone pretty well in that time.” Paul dabbed properly at his mouth with his napkin. “The point is… I know damn well he wants to off me.”
Alek couldn’t believe this. “Have you gone to the police?”
“Of course not! I can’t accuse Brett Edelman of deadly intentions. Anyway, I wanted to see if he would act on it. If he would go to you. Obviously, he did.”
“So you knew he would come to me?”
“Well… to one of you, anyway.”
“One of me?”
“To a slayer. I just didn’t know he had the balls to go to the Slayer. He impresses me. He really does.”
“And how exactly do you know who I am, Mr. Paul?”
Paul shrugged, making the chair he sat in squeak. “He and I have some common interests. More precisely, those intriguing clubs you vampires run. He and I don’t frequent the same club, of course, but that’s besides the point… ”
“I’m not a vampire,” Alek said evenly.
Paul’s eyes halved menacingly. “You’re not, are you? You’re one of the rare and deadly dhampiri. Half human, half vampire. That’s like a nobility, isn’t it?” Again that mischievous smile. But when no answer was forthcoming from Alek, he went on. “Tell me, Mr. Knight, does it make you feel better to call yourself that? Does it make you feel more human to say you are a dhampir?”
Alek looked away over the city strewn about at his feet like components on a circuit board. “I think that, too, is besides the point, Mr. Paul.”
“Is it? I think it’s a fascinating subject. A man who is not a man. A hunter hunted by a legion of immortal underworld soldiers. A creature so painfully human and yet so profoundly different from us.”
Alek looked back at the man. “As usual, you overromanticize everything.”
“Perhaps.” Paul sipped his coffee and held Alek’s gaze. “So you’ve read my books.”
Alek ignored the question, folded his hands on the table, and got right down to the heart of things. “Is this the place where you offer to write my memoirs, Mr. Paul?”
“Yours? No. In reality, I find your story rather dull, Mr. Knight. What would I call it? Interview With the Vampire Slayer? All that running around the city at night, fighting with swords and all? I’m afraid it’s all been done before. No, I am more interested in employing you than I am in writing about you.”
Alek let out a sigh. “Would it surprise you to know I don’t need the work?”
“But the money…?”
This was pointless. Alek began to get up. “I have a lot of money, Mr. Paul. I don’t need yours.”
“You can never have too much money. Especially if you plan on being around a long, long time.” The look on Paul’s piggish face was infuriating.
Why had he ever come here? Alek wondered. What was he thinking? As Alek stood up, Paul grabbed his wrist, then let go as if he had been burned. He looked at his hand as if he half-expected to see something there.
“You’re cold,” Paul said.
Alek smirked. “That’s what they tell me.”
“Look,” said Paul, favoring his hand, “I can make this worth your time. Brett, that shiteater, wants to kill me… ”
“And now you want me to kill him.”
“You’ll be doing the world a favor, believe me—”
Alek reached out and grabbed the author by the lapels, pulling him close. Paul stiffened the moment Alek put his hand upon him but did not try to resist as Alek brought the man to within inches of his face. Paul’s eyes and nostrils flared with danger. “Mr. Paul,” said Alek, “forget about murdering your publisher. Forget about these games. Get yourself a new publisher. Read a book. Take up a hobby. Take care of your family and stay out of these affairs.” Alek let go and the man rocked back like a pendulum, practically slamming down into his chair. The waiters looked over and whispered among themselves, but Alek ignored them.
“Go live your life,” Alek whispered as he drew his coat close and turned to leave. “Death catches up to us all in time. Of that you can be completely sure.”
23
She never realized how lonely a cemetery could be. Not scary. Just alone. Lonely. Phoenix moved past the odd assortment of graves, some of them a hundred years old, her Doc Martens squishing against the wet earth and grass. She stopped to take a flower from each grave. A lily. A rose. Most of them were dry and brittle, a victim of the early September frost. But that didn’t bother her. Dead flowers for a dead soul, she thought, standing up with an armful of brown flowers.
The wind skated her hair away from her face. Cold. There would be snow again soon, so much frost so early this year. She found the moon over the hump of this next hill, half hidden by a mausoleum with angels atop it, but that too was cold. One cold face shining down on another.
She shivered. Oddly, she felt nothing. Nothing but cold, as if she were still in the stainless steel drawer of the morgue. As if she had left her body behind there somewhere.
She stomped over to Lilly’s new grave, walking on the turf that had been laid just the day before, and carefully laid all the grave flowers down. Most were so dead they were whisked away by the night wing.
Phoenix stood up and found the straight razor in her pocket, the same one she tried to take her own life with, once, a long time ago, in a time before she hadn’t had Lilly to look after. When she had had nothing to live for, no reason to care. The blade of the razor was cold white like the moon. She cut the cold white flesh of the palm of her hand and watched the black blood drip down onto a brown rose as a tingling sensation played throughout her hand and arm. Then the wound sewed itself up like a special affect in a movie. She cut the same hand again, and then again. Same result.
She could go on forever. She almost wanted to.
She looked down at her feet, at the blood, the immortal blood, spattered everywhere. On her shoes, on the flowers, on Lilly’s grave.
For Lilly, she thought.
24
The first discovery that Brett Edelman made on inviting himself into Michael’s suite in the Melmoth Hotel was that Michael had not been alone. He looked around the room after the slayer let him in. Empty wine bottles and a flotsam of room-service trays proved that not only had Michael not been alone last night, but that he hadn’t allowed a maid to clean up after himself and his guest, either. And yet, by far the oddest things to be found here was the miscellaneous equipment scattered around between the more mundane things. Lab equipment, Brett guessed. But he couldn’t be certain because it looked like lab equipment which might be found in some creepy old Hammer film: coiled conducting tubes, beakers half full of odd-colored substances, glass apparatuses, medical kits fitted with weird instruments that all looked particular sharp in one way or another, and—oddest of all—four large
stainless steel canisters on the table between the double beds. They looked for all the world like giant modern canoptic jars.
Michael closed and locked the door behind him.
Brett turned around, a knot of fear balling up his stomach. It was the kind of scorching, acidy fear he had not known since he was a little boy on the way to the dentist’s office. And that fear only edged up a notch when Michael looked at him.
Anything that might have been passingly human in the dhampir Alek Knight was absent in Michael. Those long, slitlike, unmistakably baleful eyes, the immoveable mouth, the bloodless, crystalline fingernails, the skin so white and perfect it might have been made of plastic, the whole being more like a weirdly-crafted doll or mannequin than anything alive—it was unnerving. Michael stood there in an old-fashioned black velvet frock coat and ruffled shirt and cravat, his arms casually crossed but his entire form at rigid attention in a posture that reminded Brett more of a lion considering a herd of grazing gazelle than anything humaneque. And for a moment, Brett was completely undecided about what to say. It had taken a combination of cajoling and outright threats before Michael agreed to see him, and now that Brett was here, facing the vampire, he was struck dumb.
Finally, Michael chose to speak. “You blokes. You stupid, suffering lot.”
“What?” And Brett’s voice came out much softer and squeakier than he had ever heard it in his entire adult life.
Michael smiled malignly. “You think you are superior to us because you run this old globe. You think you are so clever. So… immortal. But you could go extinct in a heartbeat. Plague. Meteor. It’s happened before. And besides, despite the fact that you breed like locusts, how great are your lives in comparison to our own?” The vampire dropped his hands but made no move to jump Brett or do him harm. Not that Brett could do much about it if he did.
Brett swallowed and wiped at the sweat on the backs of his hands. He had listened to vampires and their kind talk before, many times, but never with this kind of superiority complex. He doubted even the Slayer, with his terrible reputation, felt this way about Brett’s human race. “Your kind die too,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”
“Yes.” Michael’s eyes clouded over a moment, then snapped back to their present sparkling malice. “We all die. Yet it is the measure of how we live which determines our greatness. And Man is so very small… ”
“I didn’t come here to debate with you,” Brett said, getting angry now.
Softly, Michael said, “Why did you come?”
For a moment Brett thought he heard something, something soft, like a gentle tinkling noise. Like someone tapping on glass. He was tempted to look behind him at the sliding glass doors hidden by heavy drapes, but he resisted the urge. He didn’t want to look away from Michael, not for a moment. And anyway, there could be no one else here. If Michael had had company last night as Brett suspected—the whore, as Brett recalled—she was gone now.
Clearing his throat, Brett said, “I came to discuss the Slayer.”
Michael narrowed his eyes to mere threads.
“I know him, you see,” said Brett, lighting a cigarette to keep his hands steady. “I’ve talked to him—”
Michael charged forward. Brett realized he could do nothing, not even when Michael plucked the cigarette from his mouth and backhanded him across the cheek. Brett crumpled to the floor, his mouth on fire and full of coppery bitterness. Jesus. He never even had even a moment to react. The blow wasn’t staggering, did not even spin his vision around, but it had been so fast and unexpected, Brett did not doubt, even a moment, that these things could kill you before you even knew you were dead.
Michael ground out the cigarette in the ashtray on the table between the two beds, and then he was back in front of Brett, all of it done in such a single fluid motion it almost seemed like Brett had dreamed the last few seconds.
“Don’t smoke in here,” Michael said coldly. “There are dangerous chemicals you know nothing about!”
“Fuck you.”
“Would you like to? But I seriously doubt you could satisfy my needs.”
Brett touched his mouth, wondering if it was as red as it felt. “I suppose you had your fill of your girlfriend last night.”
“My…?” And then Michael laughed and Brett looked at him, past the groomed Old World British exterior, and realized the thing was inhuman, mad, and possibly going to kill him before he left this room. “My dear chap, I am a priest! I don’t have girlfriends.”
“But… ”
“The redheaded whore? Would you like to meet her?” Michael asked.
No! thought Brett as an unreasonable fear bubbled and boiled within him. No no no no…!
Michael put his hands together. “I assure you she is as chaste as she was… well, as she may or may not have been before I ever touched her. We vampires are an odd lot, you see. We prefer common blood.” He turned to the table where the ashtray had his dead cigarette in it and where the three big stainless steel canoptic jars sat.
“Common blood?” Brett mimicked.
“Hmm… yes. We tend to depend on our blood relations to satisfy our sexual appetites.”
“You mean, you and… him… ”
Michael tilted his head. The look of malice had been replaced with one of almost infinite sorrow. “My brother and I have been many things to each other over the long years. We—I—am over four hundred years old, you see. And we were together since the very beginning. There has not been a day in my life until recently that I have not wakened to see Dante’s sweet face on the pillow beside me. Now, though… well… ”
“You’re fucking sick,” said Brett.
The sorrow vanished on the smooth, angelic face. “Ah yes, I forgot your human conditioning,” he said as he undid the latch on the nearest jar. The jar gave a feral hydraulic hiss on opening.
Brett watched the jar, vaguely aware that he ought to get up and run for his life. But as if he were some stupid victim in a horror film, he simply sat there, his back to the foot of the bed, watching Michael flip the top of the jar back. “Conditioning…?”
“Yes, conditioning. All those human laws and instincts to keep the gene renumbering from breaking down. Humans mustn’t mate with their siblings or their mothers or fathers. It produces an unclean bloodline, according to the ancients. Actually, the overcompatibility of the genetic codes causes a breakdown in the amino acids that make up the gene helix and the poor creature suffers and dies. Not so with us. Our genes are unique in that they can be spliced with virtually any organic matter in the world and still retain their form. That’s the primary property of what Dante and I used to jokingly call the ‘V Factor.’ Why is it a vampire or dhampir can regenerate wounds or lost parts of their bodies? Why do we cease to age at one point? Why can we not die of natural causes? These are the questions he and I and a choice few others have been searching for answers to for hundreds of years.”
Michael paused to reach into the massive jar and lift out a more conventional specimen jar. It was still enormous, but not unlike what Brett had once seen in his high school science lab, the ones where they kept frogs and sometimes larger animals in formaldehyde. This one, however, was not filled with any substance Brett recognized. The fluid in this jar was jet black, like ink. And anything in the jar was obscured.
“We used to believe the secret was in the blood,” Michael went on, admiring the enormous glass jar and the inky substance licking at the sides of it. “But you see—vampires have no blood of their own. At least, not the substance we accept as blood, which is why we must take it from a host or a victim. No, we had been pursing the wrong avenue for centuries. And then your technology improved and we were able to delve much deeper into the question.” He looked up and smiled. “The secret is here.” He touched his temple with one long, untrimmed fingernail.
“Your head?”
“My brain, to be exactly. Our brains. The vampire brain secrets a hormone capable of complete regenerative abilities. The substance has a very l
arge scientific name, but suffice to say we who study it simply call it Elixir. An amazing substance, it has no decay time. Nor does it dissipate in the body as hormones are supposed to do. In fact, it doesn’t appear to do anything but build on itself and create colony after colony of V Factor helixes. The older the vampire, the more infused with Elixir it becomes. The more powerful. The more indestructible. Rome has been fascinated by Elixir for decades and it has been my and my brother’s primary mission to disclose its true potential. If such wonders can be worked on a vampire body, what then on a human…?”
“You said Man was small.”
“He is,” Michael said. “And infinitely precious to us. Without Man, we the Vampire must die. Cause and effect. The balance of Nature.” And reaching into the jar with both hands, Michael slowly began to lift something heavy and squirming from the black depths of the jar. “This is Elixir,” Michael whispered, “And this is Man when he is exposed to it.”
Brett stared at the thing in Michael’s hands with an even mixture of fascination and overwhelming disgust. He knew what it was on an academic level, but seeing it, smelling it, being this close to it, made his mind want to shut down and deny its existence. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. Something like this belonged in a bad science fiction movie, not in real life. Not here now. Not in the really real world.
The jet-black substance drained off the thing and yet defined the odd alien landscape of it, the intricately whorled grey matter, the great, bloated pestilence of it because it had obviously been feeding off the Elixir—not drinking it, surely, because a brain could not, it had no mouth, but absorbing it through the pores. It had to be. It was too large. Or perhaps it was the tail—made up of a good two and a half feet of curling and uncurling raw ivory-white vertebrae that gave it that affect. Of being huge. Alive. Alive, yes. It was definitely alive. Brett could see that easily. The way it moved and tried to resist Michael’s hold on it like a frightened animal. But how? Brett’s mind screamed. How the fuck could anything like that be alive?
Slayer: Black Miracles Page 25