by David McAfee
“In addition, Sanders has managed to create abilities through his ignorance that have never been seen before. Quite simply, by not knowing a thing could not be done, he somehow managed to do it.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, he has found a way to feed without breaking the skin. He does not have to bite his victims anymore, he has only to touch them, and their blood is his. Thus he leaves his prey with no marks.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “Can anyone else do that?”
“Not yet, but there are some who are working on it.”
“And Kagan?” I asked. “What does he have to do with any of it?”
“About fifty years ago, Sanders caught up to Raine. She was hunting in Hell’s Kitchen when he spotted her. He didn’t wait for her to go someplace hidden; he attacked her in the middle of the street. The two fought, which of course drew a crowd.”
“Let me guess; Kagan was in the crowd.”
“Do you want to hear this or not?” She snapped.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Then stop interrupting. Kagan was indeed in the crowd, and he had spotted Raine wandering the neighborhood several times. He even had had feelings for her, or so I’ve been told. Of course, he had no way of knowing what she really was. In any case, watching Sanders hit Raine made him violently angry.
“The fight was going badly for Raine. Sanders was fast and strong, and he possessed unique abilities she was unable to counter. It wasn’t long before he had her on her back in the middle of the street and at his mercy. He would have killed her that night had not Kagan interfered.
“Kagan leapt at Sanders and barreled into him. As you know, Kagan is large and heavy, and Sanders wasn’t expecting the attack. Kagan knocked him over, freeing Raine, who got to her feet and ran without looking back to see if her rescuer would be all right.”
I winced, hoping Anna was mistaken but knowing she wasn’t. Raine was no saint.
“When Sanders got up,” Anna continued, “Raine was nowhere to be seen. He was furious. He grabbed Kagan’s arm and dragged him into an empty warehouse, killing anyone who tried to stop him. By the time anyone had the presence of mind to summon the police, Sanders had turned Kagan and fled.
“When the police got there they found Kagan’s body and took him to the morgue, where he spent the day. That night Kagan awoke, startling the morgue attendant. The attendant screamed, and Kagan, confused and afraid, took his first victim.”
“So Kagan is a vampire,” I concluded.
“Not quite,” Anna continued, “You see, Sanders was never taught the mystical rites necessary for the conversion. Do you recall Councilor Lannis speaking a strange language when she fed you her blood?”
I nodded.
“The language was Aramaic. The words she spoke were a prayer to the Father to grant his gift to you, that you may serve him. Sanders was never taught the words, thus when he transformed Kagan he didn’t really know what he was doing. The result is that Kagan is not quite a vampire, and not quite human. He’s a mixture of both. A hybrid.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well,” she continued, “he has certain vampire abilities: strength, speed, silence, and the like. But he learned them from Sanders, so we don’t know exactly how they work, either. He requires blood to survive, but he has no fangs, so he has to chew his way into an artery in order to get to it. He has been known to use a knife on occasion, however.”
I thought of Grabby’s mangled throat in the alley, and the gurgling scream he’d made as he died, and shuddered.
“Also, Kagan can die by mundane means,” Anna said. “A bullet, or a knife, for example. The thing is, he doesn’t stay dead. No one really knows why. The current theory holds that his soul never left his body, as it does with most vampires. If true, it means that he does not feed because he needs a soul, but because blood is the only thing his body can metabolize now. He can still consume regular food, several of us have seen him do it, but apparently it will no longer sustain him.
“When he dies, his soul tries to escape, but it can’t. The psalm that holds Kagan to this life binds it. The next night Kagan wakes again with the full memory of his death and what occurred.”
No wonder he was pissed. I couldn’t imagine having to go through death not just once, but many times over. There was still one nagging question, though.
“So why is Kagan working with Sanders?” I asked. “You’d think he’d hate him.”
“He does,” she replied. “But Kagan hates this life even more.”
“You lost me.”
“Carl has told Kagan he can release him, but only if Kagan helps him capture Raine. Joel Kagan is working with Carl Sanders in the hope that Sanders, once Raine is destroyed, will grant him the one thing Kagan wants most of all.”
“What? To be human again? Is that possible?”
“No and no,” she replied. “Kagan wants to die. He works for Sanders in the hope that Sanders will eventually kill him. He desires it so badly he will kill anything and anyone Sanders tells him to. Including us.”
“Damn,” I said. It was all I could think to say. I drove the rest of the way in silence and digested this new information as Anna guided me to the next safe house, which turned out to be anything but safe.
Chapter Nineteen
The Old Man
October 1st, 1985
The old man who let us into the house looked like he might fall over and die at any time. His skin had that pale, translucent appearance that only comes from old age. His thin, wispy hair looked like stretched cotton fibers glued to his scalp among the liver spots. His frail-looking frame was bent by time, and I thought he could use a walker, but he shuffled along with his old man’s gait and didn’t seem to need one.
“Welcome,” he rasped, his voice like the whisper of coarse linen, “Please come in.”
He seemed harmless enough, but there was something I didn’t quite trust about him. It’s his eyes, I thought. They don’t fit the picture.
Indeed they didn’t. They were sharp and clear and not at all the eyes of an ally. The hard gray orbs were too bright, too keen on what was going on around them to be the eyes of a fragile old man. They shifted almost constantly from underneath the white tufts on his brow, never staying on any one thing for more than a split second, and never meeting ours at all. They were the eyes of a man with a secret.
One look at Anna told me she had noticed, too. Her face showed more than her usual amount of displeasure, and I thought she would reach out and throttle him then and there. Instead she followed along after the shuffling old timer as he led us down the stairs and into his basement. I made a mental note to ask her why she didn’t kill him right away as soon as we were alone.
He led us to a stout wooden door which, I noticed, did not have a means of barring from the outside. I took that as a good sign; it would be hard for him to lock us in. He stood to the side, giving us a view of a bare stone room with two cots for sleeping and, thankfully, no windows. He motioned for us to enter, and we did.
“Do you need anything before I go?” He asked.
Anna shook her head, and the old man – who had never introduced himself – left, closing the door behind him. I listened for the sound of a latch being pulled or a bar being put in place just in case he might have hidden them, but I didn’t hear anything. After a moment I relaxed a bit, and turned to ask Anna my question.
To my surprise Anna was staring at me, her features twisted with displeasure.
“You don’t trust him, do you?” She asked.
“No,” I replied. “And neither do you.”
Anna sat on the corner of her cot and crossed her legs. By her stance, I knew I was about to get another lesson. “What makes you so sure?” She asked.
“I saw your face. What’s more, I saw his face. I saw the way his eyes darted everywhere, and they are far too bright for such an old man. If I noticed as much, then I figured you must have noticed, too.”
S
he nodded. “Very good. There is more, but you would not have known.”
I knew she was about to fill me in, so I sat on my cot and waited.
“The man who owns this house is named Carlton Maize. He is about ninety-seven years old and has worked for the Council his whole life. His father worked for the Council, as did his father, and so on down the line. For generations, the Maize family has maintained a sanctuary for Bachyir in the city of Boston. They know the ins and outs of our kind better than any servant family in New England.”
I nodded. I knew about servant families. They are usually people whom the Council allowed to live in exchange for providing temporary suitable shelters for vampires on the road. Some do so grudgingly, while others take a great deal of pride in it. The Council pays these families well for the service, although the rules are very strict and the punishments for breaking them are swift and severe. For a family to carry the tradition along generation after generation would mean they were proud of their work. That fact alone should have set my mind at ease, but it didn’t.
“Then why don’t you trust him?” I asked.
“I was a Lost One for eighty-seven years,” Anna said, “but before then I was a vampire for seventy-three, and I have been to Boston many times. I have stayed in this very house on no less than nine occasions. The last time I was here, back in 1895, I met Carlton Maize. He was just a little boy back then, but I recognize the features well enough. Before we left the Halls, I asked Councilor Lannis if the Maize House was still in operation. She informed me it was, and also that it was being run by Carlton.”
“Okay, so what? The guy’s old, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You saw his eyes, Vincent. What color were they?”
“They were gray,” I replied. “Gray like the sky just before a storm.”
“Right. Gray. The Carlton Maize I met ninety years ago had brown eyes.”
Brown eyes. That’s a pretty careless mistake.
“That’s a big blunder,” I said. “It would be hard not to notice a thing like that.”
“Whoever he is probably didn’t know I had been here before and met the real Carlton Maize,” Anna replied, “They probably thought the disguise was pretty good. And it is, if not for the glaring difference in the eyes, I might not have paid the man any extra attention at all.”
“So…if you know he’s an imposter, why is he still alive?”
“Because I want to know what he’s up to, and who he’s working for.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Anna smiled. Her fangs shone in the dim light of the room. It was all the answer I needed.
***
Before we bedded down for the day, Anna placed a Psalm around us which prevented anyone from coming within ten feet of our bodies while we slept. It consisted of a circle of powdered bone spread around our beds and a few words spoken in Aramaic. It’s about the only thing we can do to protect ourselves in the wild. Normally, in a sanctuary, such a step would be unnecessary, since such a place is protected by the owners. However, since the safety and integrity of the sanctuary itself was in question, we had to resort to other methods to ensure our safety. I wasn’t about to argue.
When we awoke at Dusk, the man pretending to be Carlton Maize was already in our room. He stood like a rickety fencepost at the edge of the bone dust border.
“What’s this?” He asked. “Why the Psalm of Protection? Don’t you feel safe?”
“It never hurts to take precautions,” Anna said as she sat up to regard him. Then she uttered a word in that ancient language and the line drawn around our beds disappeared.
“Indeed,” he replied, and I thought I caught the slightest trace of a grin cross his face. “One can’t be too careful.”
Anna shot across the room and grabbed the fake Carlton by the throat faster than I could blink. Then she shoved him backward into the wall, smacking the back of his head on the concrete. ‘Carlton,’ or whatever his name was, sputtered and tried to speak, but Anna shook him and banged his head on the wall again. “Shut up,” she said. “You will speak when spoken to. Understand?”
The man’s hand darted behind his back. I ran toward them just as he withdrew it. I saw something shiny and metallic glinting in his palm, and I didn’t have time to think anymore. I dove at Anna just as a bright burst of yellow light shot from his hand into the room. I managed to knock her free, but not before she got a nasty burn on her left shoulder.
“UV!” She screamed, “That bastard had a UV Grenade!”
The man threw the depleted grenade to the floor and started to run back up the stairs. I sprang to my feet to give chase. Despite the disguise, he really was an old man, and none too light on his feet. I caught him halfway up the stairs and dragged him back, cursing and spitting.
After I wrangled him back into the basement Anna spoke another Psalm, this one sent red tendrils of smoky light from her fingers to wrap around the old man’s wrists, binding him as effectively as handcuffs.
“Get his legs, too,” I suggested, “just to be safe.”
She did, grinning.
When he was suitably bound, she slapped him across the face. “That’s for this,” she said, pointing to her burned shoulder.
The old man, for his part, didn’t flinch or draw back, accepting the slap stolidly and with just a hint of martyrdom.
“Do your worst,” he said, and spit at Anna’s feet. We were happy to oblige.
***
Two hours later Anna and I sped toward an abandoned church in our stolen car. It had not taken long to bring the old man to the point where he was willing to tell us anything we wanted to know, and what Anna and I wanted to know was, of course, who he was working for. The answer surprised us both.
“Raine,” he said just after I broke three of the fingers on his right hand.
“Raine?” Anna and I asked together.
“What do you know about Raine?” I asked.
“She told me the Council would send someone after her to bring her back. She said…she said they were going to turn her into a Lost One.” At this point he started sobbing, “Is that true?” he continued. “Will she be Lost?”
“Of course not,” Anna said, “Raine is the daughter of Councilor Ramah himself. Do you really think they will turn her into a Lost One?”
“Raine does,” he said.
“Then she is mistaken,” Anna replied, “Councilor Ramah would never allow such a thing. He would fight the Council every step of the way. If you know Raine at all, you must know that much is true.”
Of course, I knew Anna was lying, but the way she spoke she almost had me convinced, and I was in the room when the Council passed Raine’s sentence. By the look in the old man’s watery eyes, I could tell he believed her, too. At least he was starting to. Perhaps after the things we’d done to him, he merely wanted to believe. It would make giving her up much easier if he thought we were going to help her.
I decided to take a chance.
“Listen, friend,” I said, “I don’t know your name, but we both know you aren’t Carlton Maize. Whoever you are, Raine is in trouble. Carl Sanders and Joel Kagan are in Boston looking for her right now. Do you know who they are?”
His eyes widened at the mention of the two renegades. He nodded.
“Sanders has already killed the owner of at least one Boston sanctuary,” I continued, “and he’s probably looking for the others. We want to get to Raine before he does, so we can help her. She’s not safe out there right now.”
That was a stretch, and I knew it. Raine was more capable than Anna and myself combined. I just hoped the old man didn’t know that.
“Anna, fix those,” I said, pointing at the man’s fingers. “He is no enemy.”
Anna gave me a dubious look, but she did as I asked. She placed her fingers over the old man’s and whispered a few words of Aramaic. Again came that red glow, and in short order his fingers were whole again. Anna then tended to his other wounds, none of them severe, but al
l of them painful, I’m sure. Then she released him from her tendrils. He slumped into a chair and flexed his fingers.
“Is that better?” I asked. He nodded.
“You were half right,” I said, “The Council of Thirteen did send us after Raine, but to protect her, not to harm her. They know Sanders and Kagan are in Boston, and Councilor Ramah fears for her safety. If you know where she is, you would be doing the Council a great service by telling me.”
“And,” Anna added, “We would be inclined to overlook the fact that you are not Carlton Maize. The Council would surely frown upon an imposter holding sanctuary in such an honored house. Do you know what the Council does to humans who anger them?”
The old man’s face went deathly white, and for a short time he seemed unable to reply. Then he nodded; a weak, barely perceptible incline of the head. Anna’s threat had finished him. This time, when I asked him where to find Raine, he told me.
Afterward, I packed a few things from the sanctuary’s stock while Anna snapped the old man’s neck.
***
When Anna and I arrived at the long abandoned Church of the Apostles in Dorchester, I knew right away something was amiss. I didn’t have anything to base my feelings of trepidation on other than instinct, and Anna seemed not to notice anything, so I went along. She’d been grumpy ever since Sanders had found that first sanctuary, and I didn’t want to give her any reason to whale on me, not when we were so close. Besides, it was probably just my imagination.
From the outside, the building was immense, easily a hundred feet across on the front face. Four faded gray stone spires, one on each corner of the structure, soared high into the night, each topped by an iron crucifix. The massive front doors were thick, but decrepit, the hinges rusted away to almost nothing. Ivy clung to the outside walls, a blanket of green over the cold gray stone. The vines hid most of the Church’s stained glass windows, but the few that remained visible were boarded up, offering no view of the inside. Here and there I noted small piles of gray rubble, pieces of the church itself. The whole place reeked of abandonment and disrepair.